The contractor, according to the RAE, is the one who contracts. That is, the party that contracts a certain service, for example, reflected in a contract.
To know what a contractor is, we must first know what a contract is. In this sense, we must point out that a contract is a voluntary agreement between two parties, which is reflected in writing and establishes a specific relationship between the parties involved in it.
That said, we must know that a contract usually involves two parties. Through said contract, they will establish an agreement. These parties are the contractor and the contractor. The first hires the second, while the second agrees to fulfill the commitment made.
The contractor, therefore, is the one who contracts something, in this case a service. If we talk about the world of insurance, the contractor is the one who contracts the insurance. If we talk about the world of law, the contractor is the client who pays the lawyer for his services, since he hires him. In essence, someone who hires something, usually a service.
Employer and Contractor
Because we are talking about very similar concepts, we sometimes tend to confuse the two, as with others such as “lender” and “borrower.”
For this reason, it is convenient to highlight that whenever we talk about a contractor, we are talking about the party in the contract that hires a certain service, for example.
While when we talk about the contractor, we are talking about the person hired, who must correspond to the execution of the contracted service, as stipulated in the contract.
In practice, we call contractors to those companies, or freelance profiles, which carry out work for another organization in particular. In this sense, work related to the construction of a highway or a building, for example. In other words, we are talking about professional profiles that are offered to carry out very specific jobs and for which a specific and limited hiring is required.
Contractor profile
The profile of the contractor, in the field of Public Administration and Public Contracts, refers to the section or space that an Administration must have to post announcements and publications related to the contracts carried out by the Administration and by order of the Government.
In this space, the Administration must publish the information related to tenders, awards, procurement documents, as well as everything related to those services that the Public Administration contracts or wishes to contract.
And we must know that the Administration has limits when it comes to hiring, since it cannot select exclusively and except in certain cases, a company because it feels like it. This process, like everything else, must be democratic, so it must follow the traditional process, through bidding.
Contracting entity
In the field of Public Administration and public contracting, the contracting entity is that institution, body or company that is empowered to contract, through a public contract, a specific service.
In other words, we are simply talking about the organization that wishes to contract the service and makes the offer. In this case, if we are talking about an offer to remodel a town hall building, the contracting entity would be the town hall itself. If the Ministry of Economy seeks a team of consultants to carry out a specific report, the contracting entity would be the ministry itself.
In summary, it is very simple, since we are talking about that institution interested in hiring a certain service.
