Subcontractors: Control of Work You Do Not Do

Your client does not care who did the work. They hired you, the invoice came from you, and if the tiling is wrong or somebody gets hurt, the conversation is with you. That is the whole subcontractor problem in one sentence: you carry the relationship and the liability for work performed by people you do not employ and cannot directly supervise.

What to hold, and what expires

Keeping documents current is where the work actually is. Collecting these is a one-time task that most businesses do properly; keeping them current is an ongoing one that almost nobody does, because nothing prompts it and the consequence is invisible until it is severe.

Reading a certificate to pull out the coverage, the limits and the expiry date is tedious comparison work and a good automation candidate, with the usual caution about scanned documents, as in extracting data from PDFs. What makes it pay is the reminder that fires sixty days before a lapse.

Write down what good looks like

Most businesses have a confident sense of which subcontractors are reliable and no evidence they could show anyone, including the subcontractor. That makes a difficult conversation into an argument about impressions.

Three cheap records fix it. Photographs at defined stages rather than whenever somebody remembers. A short completion checklist per trade, written as observable states rather than intentions, which is the design described in checklists that hold up. And a defect log per subcontractor so the pattern is countable.

A year of that turns the renewal conversation from a matter of opinion into a matter of record, and it tells you which subs to give the difficult jobs to.

The four clauses that prevent most disputes

Who fixes defects, and within what period. Without this, remedial work becomes a negotiation at the worst possible moment, with your client waiting.

What happens if they do not turn up on an agreed date. A no-show costs you a day on site and a conversation with the client, and the agreement is usually silent on it.

Whether they can send a different crew. You assessed one team and a different one arrives, which is common and reasonable to allow with notice and unreasonable to discover on the morning.

How variations get approved. Agreed in advance in writing, or argued about afterwards from memory. This single clause is behind more subcontractor invoice disputes than all the others together, and it connects to the purchase order discipline on your own buying side.

Check the invoice against something

A subcontractor invoice should match an agreed rate and a recorded amount of work. Where neither exists in a form you can compare against, you are approving from memory, which is how a few percent leaks on every job without anyone being dishonest.

Matching the invoice to the agreement and to what was recorded as completed is routine comparison work, and the useful output is a short queue of mismatches for a person rather than an approval decision. That split is the same one described in quality assurance when AI writes the first draft.

Subcontractor cost sits above the gross margin line, so leakage here reduces margin directly rather than showing up in overhead, which is the distinction in where AI actually moves your gross margin.

What to put in place first

One spreadsheet or system holding every active subcontractor with the expiry date of each document and a reminder sixty days out. That is a morning of work and it removes the failure mode most likely to hurt you.

Then the completion checklist per trade, then the defect log. Each is small, each compounds, and together they turn subcontractor management from a relationship you hope holds into something you can evidence. The scheduling side of coordinating multiple trades is in staff scheduling, and sector starting points are in our pages for construction, HVAC and plumbing.

Frequently Asked Questions