Subcontractor Compliance Software: A Worked Example for a High-Volume Main Contractor

An Illustrative Worked Example, Not a Customer Story

This is an illustrative worked example, not a customer story. DocCompliance is a new product and we don't publish case studies we can't evidence. No contractor is named below, because no real contractor is being described.

What is genuine here is the regulatory position, the arithmetic, and the failure modes. Those do not depend on having a customer to quote.

The Scenario (Our Premises)

Assume a mid-sized main contractor in the South East of England, delivering commercial fit-out and residential development schemes. It employs around 80 people directly and engages several hundred subcontractor firms over the course of a year, across a wide trade mix: groundworks, electrical, mechanical, roofing, plastering and specialist fit-out.

Assume compliance is managed the way it commonly is at that size — a set of spreadsheets, a shared document folder, and an administrator who chases documents by email. That arrangement is not negligent. It is what most contractors grow out of rather than deliberately choose.

These are premises we have chosen, not findings we are reporting. What follows is what tends to break in that arrangement, and why.

The Challenges

Challenge 1 — One Process, Many Different Document Requirements

A main contractor with a wide trade mix does not have a single compliance checklist. It has one per trade, sitting on top of a common core.

The common core applies to essentially every subcontractor: employers' liability insurance, which is compulsory under the Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969 for almost all employers; public liability cover to whatever limit the contract specifies; a written health and safety policy, which is a statutory requirement under section 2(3) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 for any employer with five or more employees; RAMS for the work being undertaken; and evidence of occupational competence for the operatives attending site.

On top of that sits the trade-specific layer. An electrical contractor's competence evidence looks nothing like a scaffolding contractor's, which looks nothing like that of a firm doing licensable work with asbestos. The documents differ, the issuing bodies differ, and the renewal cycles differ.

Here the arithmetic does the work. Take a contractor holding six document types per subcontractor across a panel of 60 active firms. That is 360 live documents, each with its own expiry date, sitting behind a single spreadsheet. If those renewals are spread evenly across the year, roughly 30 fall due every month — permanently, with nothing to announce that they are due.

A spreadsheet does not raise its hand. That is the structural point, and it matters more than any individual lapse.

Challenge 2 — CDM 2015 and the Building Safety Act Raise the Evidential Bar

Under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015, a duty holder must take reasonable steps to satisfy themselves that anyone they appoint has the necessary skills, knowledge and experience — and, where the appointee is an organisation, the organisational capability to carry out the work safely.

Read that carefully. It is not only a duty to appoint competent firms. It is a duty to have satisfied yourself, which in practice means being able to show what you checked and when. A contractor who appointed an entirely competent subcontractor but kept no record of the check has still not evidenced the duty.

Where the work involves higher-risk buildings, the Building Safety Act 2022 regime adds golden thread obligations: information about the building must be created, maintained and handed over in a structured, accessible form. A shared folder organised by whoever happened to save the file is a poor foundation for that.

Challenge 3 — Manual Tracking Fails Silently

This is the failure mode that matters most, and it is the one that is easiest to underestimate.

An expired insurance certificate looks exactly like a current one until somebody opens it and reads the date. A lapsed competence card is invisible on a spreadsheet row that was accurate when it was typed. Nothing changes colour. Nothing sends an email.

The consequence is that gaps are discovered in arrears rather than prevented — typically when a subcontractor is already mobilised, or when a client or auditor asks. That produces exactly the pattern most contractors will recognise: a scramble days before someone is due on site, and work held up while a certificate is chased.

Manual tracking does not fail occasionally and visibly. It fails quietly and continuously, and you find out on someone else's schedule.

The Solution

What would a contractor in this position actually need to build? Three things, interlocking: a single register of who is engaged and what they must hold, a mechanism that surfaces expiry before it bites, and a record that is a by-product of the work rather than a separate job.

This is what DocCompliance is designed to do, stated as capability rather than as anyone's result:

  • A single subcontractor register. Every subcontractor firm in one place, with the documents held against the firm they belong to rather than scattered across folders and inboxes.
  • Trade-specific document requirements. Different requirement sets per trade, so an electrical contractor and a scaffolding contractor are not assessed against the same generic checklist.
  • Automated expiry tracking and chasing. Alerts fire ahead of expiry, and reminders go to the subcontractor, so those renewal dates chase you rather than waiting to be found.
  • A subcontractor portal. Subcontractors upload directly against a clear list of what is required, which moves the submission burden off your administrator.
  • Attributed, timestamped records. Every upload and approval is recorded against a named user and a time — which is what turns a pile of documents into evidence that a check took place.
  • An audit pack export. The register exports as a structured pack rather than being reassembled by hand under time pressure.

A Sensible Order of Work

If you were doing this, the sequence matters more than the calendar. We are deliberately not putting a duration on it — that depends entirely on the state of your existing records, which we cannot see.

  1. Consolidate the register. Get every active subcontractor into one place with the documents you currently hold. Expect this step to surface the backlog rather than resolve it; that is the point of doing it first.
  2. Define the requirement matrix per trade. Decide what each trade must hold before anyone attends site. This is a governance decision, not a software one, and it is worth the argument.
  3. Work the backlog. Chase the gaps the consolidation exposed. Some resolve immediately; others depend on the subcontractor, which is outside your control and should not be planned as though it is.
  4. Open the portal and turn on alerts. Shift submission to the subcontractor and let expiry dates prompt you from that point forward.
  5. Run a mock audit. Export a full pack and read it as though you were the client's auditor or the HSE. If it does not answer the question, better to discover that now.

What This Would Give the Contractor

Not a percentage. A different position:

  • Current document status per subcontractor, visible without asking anyone or opening a folder.
  • Renewals prompted rather than remembered, which addresses the actual cause of missed expiry dates rather than the symptom.
  • Evidence that appointment checks were carried out, attributed and dated, which is what the CDM 2015 duty actually calls for.
  • An audit pack you can produce on request, instead of reconstructing months of history when someone asks.

We are not going to tell you how many hours that saves, or what it does to your compliance rate. We do not know your baseline, and any figure we published would be invented.

Key Takeaways

  1. Compliance is an evidence problem, not a filing problem. Holding the right documents and being able to demonstrate that you checked them are different achievements. CDM 2015 asks for the second one.

  2. A wide trade mix means a matrix, not a checklist. Applying one generic document list across every trade either over-collects from simple engagements or under-collects from high-risk ones. Usually both, at once.

  3. The dangerous failure mode is the silent one. Expired documents are indistinguishable from current ones until someone looks. Any system that depends on someone remembering to look will eventually be found out — and typically at the least convenient moment.

Conclusion

The contractor described here is invented, but the position is not. As a contractor's subcontractor base widens, document management stops being an administrative task and becomes an evidential one — and manual processes fail precisely where the consequences get serious.

Software helps here for one specific reason, and it is worth being clear about it: it makes the record a by-product of the work, rather than an additional job that somebody has to remember to do.

Plans start at £99 per month, priced on active sites plus a combined people pool covering your own team and your subcontractors' workers, with no cap on the number of subcontractor companies you engage. See doccompliance.io/pricing for the detail.

To see whether it fits how you operate, visit DocCompliance.io.

The contractor in this article is invented and the article is an illustrative worked example, not a customer case study. No outcome described is a claim about results achieved by any contractor.