Know which sub-trades are covered, what you owe them, and what you are holding back.

Company, contact, trade and how to reach them. Bring your existing list in from an Excel file, a CSV, or rows pasted out of a spreadsheet. Every row is matched and shown to you before anything is saved.

For each sub-trade, record their general liability, workers’ compensation, auto and umbrella documents with the date each runs out. A sub-trade counts as compliant when general liability and workers’ compensation are both on file and current. Anything else is shown as missing, expired or waiting for your review, with the reason.

Every night Ridgepole checks the dates. Thirty days out, a document is marked expiring and you are told, again every few days until it is replaced. On the day it lapses you get an in-app alert and an email. One button emails the sub-trade a reminder, if you have their email address.

Each job has a compliance scorecard: how many of the sub-trades on it are covered today.

A contract on a job carries its value, scope, dates, the holdback percentage you withhold, and the budget line its payments land on. Keep the signed copy in the job’s Documents.

Log a payment and the holdback comes off at the contract’s rate. The full value of the work goes to the job’s budget as cost; the cheque is that amount less the holdback. Each job shows what you are holding for every sub-trade: withheld, released, and still owed.

Releasing holdback is recorded as a payment of its own. If you have no unconditional waiver on file from that sub-trade for that job, Ridgepole tells you before you release it, because releasing before they have given up their lien rights is the exact risk holdback exists to cover.

On Enterprise with QuickBooks Online connected, each sub-trade payment is entered in QuickBooks under the job, with the holdback kept back on a Holdback Payable account, and releasing it pays that off.

Each waiver is recorded against the payment it covers: conditional or unconditional, and pending, received or not required, with the date it came in. Before any release you can see, payment by payment, whose paperwork is in and whose is not.

If what you collect before paying is a statutory declaration, track it here against that payment and keep the signed copy in the job’s Documents.

Put a scope out to bid from the job. Sub-trades get an email with a link and price it there, no account needed. A price phoned in or scribbled on paper can be entered too, and is compared beside the rest. Award it and Ridgepole writes a draft contract for the awarded amount.

The subcontractor portal is a separate site for your sub-trades, signed into with an emailed link and no password. In it they can see their contracts, see what you have paid them, upload a new certificate for you to review, answer or decline your bid requests, acknowledge purchase orders and send you their bills. An uploaded certificate does not count toward compliance until someone at your company has opened it and accepted it.