Contractors

The contractor register is the org-wide master list of every trade, sub-contractor, and supplier your team works with. Add a contractor once, and they're available across every project in the organisation — for assigning defects, raising work orders, and tracking insurance.

What's on a contractor

Each contractor record holds:

→Name — the company name (required).
→Email and phone — top-level company contacts.
→Insurance policies — as many as the company holds (public liability, workers compensation, professional indemnity, contract works, or a type of your own), each with its cover amount and expiry. The dashboard flags the soonest expiry so you don't engage a contractor whose cover has run out.
→Checklist — a free-form list of compliance items the contractor needs to complete (e.g. inductions, safety certificates, contract signing).
→SWMS and insurance documents — the company's safe work method statements and its certificates of currency, held against the company record rather than re-uploaded per job (see below).

Contractors are organisation-scoped, not project-scoped. The same contractor record carries across every project they work on.

SWMS and insurance documents

Each contractor record carries a document library, split into two groups that behave differently on purpose.

SWMS

Every SWMS entry is a file plus a short description of what it covers — "Rev C, supersedes prior", "Confined space entry, basement plant only". The description is required, so an entry can never arrive as an untitled PDF nobody can identify six months later.

→When the contractor is assigned to a project, the SWMS on the company record at that moment are linked to the project in the same action. The paperwork is on file before anyone starts.
→Entries added to the library after an assignment don't appear on that project by themselves. Add them from the project's own SWMS list, which shows how many more are sitting in the library.
→A project links to the library copy, never a duplicate. Correct the description once and it reads correctly on every project.
→Removing an entry from a project leaves the library untouched. Deleting it from the library tells you how many projects use it before it goes from all of them.

There is no expiry date on a SWMS entry and no renewal reminder. If you need a revision tracked, put it in the description.

Insurance

Insurance is kept as policies, not just files: each one has a type, a cover amount and an expiry, and a company can hold several at once. The directory shows how many a company holds, and the expiry the dashboard flags is always the soonest of them. Certificates of currency upload alongside the SWMS on the same record, but they are not carried onto projects — the dates you act on are the policies themselves.

Multiple contacts per contractor

A contractor company often has multiple people you deal with — a director for contracts, a foreman for site queries, a back-office contact for invoicing. Each contractor record supports multiple named contacts:

→Name (required) and email, phone, trade (e.g. "Site supervisor", "Accounts").
→One contact can be marked as the default — the one that gets the first notification when work is assigned.

Contact emails are how trades get accounts

The email addresses on a contractor and its contacts do more than route notifications. They're the match key for trade self-enrolment.

When someone signs up with an email that already appears on one of your contractor records, they're provisioned as a trade inside your organisation, scoped to that contractor's work — no invitation, no approval queue, and no chance of a second "ABC Plumbing" appearing in your directory. You're notified when it happens.

The practical consequence: keeping contact emails current is worth more than it looks. A foreman whose email is right in the directory gets a correctly-scoped account the first time they try. One whose isn't gets offered a workspace of their own, which is a support call.

See Trades, tenants & clients for the full picture.

Internal notes

Each user can add private notes against a contractor. Notes are scoped to the author and the organisation — they're visible to the team but tied to who wrote them. Use them for:

→Job history ("Did the basement waterproofing on Project X — solid work, slow on remedials").
→Issues to watch ("Always confirm material delivery dates in writing").
→Internal preference notes that don't belong in a formal record.

Notes don't flow to the contractor — they're internal context for your team only.

Merging duplicates

If the same contractor gets added twice (e.g. once as "ABC Plumbing" and once as "ABC Plumbing Pty Ltd"), you can merge them:

→Pick the primary record (the one you want to keep).
→All defect assignments, work orders, contacts, and notes from the duplicate are reassigned to the primary.
→The merge is recorded with counts (how many contacts, notes, assignments moved) and the user who performed it.
→The duplicate is soft-deleted, not erased — the audit trail of who did what before the merge stays intact.

Merging is non-destructive. If you merge the wrong way, you can re-create the original and reassign — but it's better to be deliberate the first time.

Soft delete

Contractors aren't hard-deleted from the system. When you remove a contractor, they're flagged inactive — historical records (assignments, work orders, distributions) keep referencing the same contractor name, so reports from prior periods still read correctly.