How do I 'assign' a task to someone outside our company and so not a JIRA user.

[Julian Ranger]

This is to show that an external third party has to do the task.  Important to know that especially when that task needs to be done before team members can progress wit their task.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Julian Ranger 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

If you have not enabled Anonymous/Public access to your instance then the Assignee can be set only to licensed users of your Jira instance.

You could add a custom Status to the issue workflow such as "Assigned Externally" to indicate that an issue is being worked on by an external party. However that external party will not be able to update the issue if they are not licensed users of your Jira instance, or you have not enabled Anonymous/Public access to your instance.

If the external party needs to be able to update the issue then your choices are:

1. Enable Anonymous/Public access to the project, or

2. Give the external party an Atlassian Cloud Account to which you grant access to your instance/project, or

3. Look for a third party app that would enable the external party to update you Jira data without being a directly licensed user of your instance.