Sub Work Out Without Handing Over Your Client

Almost every AV job has a part someone else does. A dry-hire house covers the boxes you are short of, a rigger comes in for the day, a caterer takes the whole hospitality line. The work is routine. What you send them usually is not: a forwarded PDF with the prices still in it, or an email trimmed by hand at seven in the morning, hoping you deleted the right lines.

The risk in that is not really the price. It is the client. A proposal names them on every page, and a supplier who learns who the end client is has everything they need to quote that client directly next year. A non-solicitation clause is worth very little if the document it sits on names the company it is meant to protect.

CueQuote now issues a work order instead. Open the Suppliers tab on any job, tick the lines you are subbing out — or, in Planner mode, award a whole section such as Catering — and send one link. This is what the supplier opens, with no login and no account:

A work order as the supplier sees it: their scope, the venue, the load-in window, the site contact, and their own price. No client name, no sell price.

Everything they need to turn up and work is there: what they are supplying, the dates, the venue and address, the load-in window, and who to call on site. The total reads GBP 2,466 — what this supplier is being paid. On the job it came from, those same three lines are sold for GBP 5,840. The supplier never sees that number, and never sees the client's name, contact details or the proposal's scope summary.

The scope text is written from the lines you selected rather than copied from the proposal. That is not a stylistic choice. A proposal's scope summary is written for the client and names them — "full-service production for Halstead Financial's annual results briefing" — so it can never be forwarded. Generating the text from the items also describes the job more usefully: what the supplier is supplying, not what the event is about.

The part that is easy to miss is item descriptions. Those are written for the client too, and they get copied onto the order. So CueQuote reads them, and refuses to issue a work order whose text names your client — pointing at the line to fix, even when it is a line you did not write. If a flagged word is ordinary vocabulary for you rather than a client's identity, you mark it once for that client and it is never flagged again.

Insurance is checked, and checked against the right date. Add a supplier's public liability expiry once, and a work order will not go out if the cover runs out before your load-out — not merely if it has already lapsed today. Cover that is valid the week you book and expired on the morning of the show is the failure that actually costs money, and checking against today waves it straight through. You can still send: the reason goes on the order with your name against it, which is the point of an override rather than a block.

The supplier accepts by typing their name. The date, the time and their answer are recorded on the order, so "they confirmed on the 3rd" stops being a memory of a phone call. If the job changes, or the link gets forwarded to someone it should not reach, revoke it. Reading and accepting stop together — a revoked link that could still confirm a booking would be worse than one that could still read a venue name.

A revoked link. A wrong token, an expired one and a withdrawn one all say the same thing, so nobody can tell which they hold.

Planner mode works the same way with a different unit. An organiser rarely subs out three line items; they award Catering, or Production, or Transport, to one supplier in one go. Pick the section and the scope text writes itself from everything under it.

It is available on every plan. Free accounts keep two work orders live at a time, Starter ten, and Pro and above unlimited — and revoking one frees the slot, so the limit is about what is outstanding rather than what you have ever sent.