Subcontractor Compliance & Onboarding Tracker: Block Dispatch Until the Docs Are Good

The problem this kills

You hire subcontractors to take overflow work, and on paper they all carry insurance, hold the right licenses, and signed your agreement. In practice, that paperwork lives in an inbox, a shared drive, and a spreadsheet someone updated three months ago. The certificate of insurance expired in April. The license renewal never came in. The W9 is for a company name that no longer matches. And nobody notices — until the day a sub with lapsed coverage damages a customer's property and you discover you've been dispatching an uninsured crew.

The whole point of vetting a subcontractor is undone the moment their documents go stale and nobody is watching the expiry dates. Compliance leads chase the same missing COI every quarter, service managers dispatch whoever's available without checking whether their file is current, and there's no single place that answers the one question that matters: is this sub safe to send out today? You don't need an expensive compliance platform to fix this, and you don't need to be a developer to build the fix.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool that tracks subcontractor compliance and gates dispatch on it. You onboard each sub, and the tool builds a compliance checklist from your required document types — certificate of insurance, W9/tax, trade licenses, the signed master agreement, whatever your business actually requires. You upload each document (stored securely, never public) and record its expiry date. The tool watches those dates and raises expiry alerts before coverage lapses. A compliance lead reviews and approves each document — the AI never decides on its own that a sub is good. Only when every required document is approved and unexpired does the sub flip to dispatch-eligible. Expired insurance is a hard block — no override, no exceptions. And you can export the whole compliance picture as a clean CSV in the exact columns your dispatch system or spreadsheet expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — which document types you actually require, what makes each one "valid," your insurance limits and any additional-insured requirements, where your sub list and docs live today, how you name and key your subcontractors, your approval rules, and the messy edge cases (a sub who works for two of your branches, a COI that covers some jobs but not others, a license that's pending renewal) — and then it tailors the checklist, the validations, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through onboarding, document upload and expiry tracking, the alert engine, the lead approval gate, the dispatch-eligibility logic, and the CSV export — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build the whole thing today even with no integration to your dispatch software.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This is real compliance tooling that decides who is allowed to work your jobs, so it ships with the controls a service operation needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's subs and documents, a complete audit trail of who uploaded, approved, rejected, and exported each document and when, a hard human-approval gate so no sub becomes dispatch-eligible until your compliance lead signs off on every required document, and duplicate guards keyed on subcontractor + document type so the same certificate can't be processed twice or two versions can't both sit there approved. Stored documents are kept private behind login, never in a public folder. And expired insurance is enforced as a hard stop the moment a date passes.

Who it's for

Compliance leads, procurement and vendor-management staff, and service managers at HVAC, plumbing, electrical, restoration, construction, property-management, and facilities operations — anyone who relies on subcontractors and is on the hook if one of them works a job without valid coverage. If you can list the documents you require and what makes each one current, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll have your first sub's compliance file gated and approved by the end of the afternoon.