The chasing that eats your week is not really about people. It is about documents that expire, dates that move, and information that lives in five inboxes. Those are all machine problems, and solving them gives you back the time to do the part that is genuinely about people.
Key takeaways
A general contractor running six to ten subtrades spends a surprising share of the week on work that produces nothing: finding out whether the drywall crew is coming Tuesday, whether the electrician’s insurance certificate is still current, whether the framer ever sent back the signed change, and whether anyone answered the plumber’s question about the wall thickness from nine days ago.
It feels like a people problem. It is mostly a records problem, and that is the useful distinction, because records problems can be automated and people problems cannot.
The compliance file behind each subtrade is a stack of dated documents, and every one of them has a date on which it silently stops being valid. In Ontario the most consequential is the WSIB clearance. The board explains that a clearance is a unique number issued to registered businesses showing that a business, contractor or subcontractor is registered and up to date, that only businesses in good standing can obtain one, and that a clearance is valid for up to 90 days.
The obligation is not administrative housekeeping. WSIB’s operational policy on clearance certificates in construction sets out that a principal who retains a contractor for construction work must obtain a clearance confirming the contractor is in good standing, that it must be obtained before the work begins and remain in effect for the entire time the contractor is performing the work, and that where a contractor hires a subcontractor the contractor becomes the principal to that subcontractor for that work.
The requirement to hold a current clearance before work begins is not just WSIB policy — it is written into the Act itself. WSIA, 1997, s.141.1(2) makes the principal who retains a contractor liable for that contractor’s own unpaid WSIB obligations, and s.141.2 lets a principal avoid that exposure only by obtaining, and keeping on file for at least three years, a current certificate before permitting the work to start. Skipping the tracker does not just risk an administrative gap; it exposes the principal to the subcontractor’s own unpaid premiums, by statute.
That is a rolling, per-subtrade, per-90-days obligation across every job. It is the single best candidate for automation on any construction back office, because it is entirely date-driven and the consequence of missing it is real.
A subtrade file that maintains itself
Extraction. When a certificate, clearance or policy arrives by email, the expiry date, the issuing body and the named business are pulled out and recorded. No one retypes anything.
Watching. The system counts down and raises the item before it lapses, per subtrade and per project.
Drafting. The reminder to the subtrade is drafted for you, naming the document and the date. You read it and send it.
Summarising. A morning list: what expires this week, what has not come back, whose questions are unanswered.
Deciding. Whether a subtrade goes on site tomorrow without a current document is a decision, and it stays with you.
The other half of subtrade chasing is questions in transit. A subtrade asks something on site, it goes to a project manager, the project manager asks the designer, and the answer — if it arrives — never returns to the person who asked. Everyone experiences this as poor communication. It is actually an absence of a register.
The workable pattern is to have the assistant read the day’s site correspondence and produce two lists: open questions with who owes the answer and how long it has been outstanding, and decisions made today that somebody downstream needs to know about. Both lists are drafted by machine and reviewed by a person in about five minutes. Almost every "the subtrade went ahead and did it wrong" story starts with an item that would have been on that first list.
Two things, and both matter more than the efficiency gains.
The first is health and safety authority. Ontario’s constructor guideline explains that the intent of the Occupational Health and Safety Act is to have one person with overall authority for health and safety on a project — the constructor — and that the constructor is the party with the greatest degree of control over health and safety for the entire project, ultimately responsible for all workers on it, and must ensure that every employer and worker on the project complies with the Act and its regulations. The guideline also notes that where an owner contracts with more than one contractor and no one has agreed to accept the constructor role, the owner will likely be deemed the constructor. Software does not sit anywhere in that chain.
The second is the payment and lien clock. Subcontractor payment questions in Ontario run on statutory timelines, and the answers change depending on whether the general contractor has itself been paid — our sister firm covers the position in subcontractor lien rights when the general contractor has not been paid and the further-down-the-chain case in sub-subcontractor lien rights in Ontario, with the practical routes set out in contractor and subcontractor payment disputes: your options. A reminder in your tracker is a convenience. The deadline itself is legal, and being reminded late by your own software is not a defence.
A residential general contractor runs four projects with nine recurring subtrades. Before: a spreadsheet nobody updates, a shared inbox, and a Monday morning that starts with 40 minutes of scrolling to reconstruct where everything stands.
After: incoming certificates and clearances are read on arrival and their expiry dates recorded automatically. Every Monday a list arrives — two clearances expiring within 14 days, one insurance certificate already lapsed, three unanswered questions older than a week, and two change requests with no written authorisation. The reminder emails are drafted; the owner reads and sends them in ten minutes.
The 40 minutes becomes ten. Nothing about the relationships changed, which is the point: the time freed goes into the two phone calls that actually needed a human voice.
No, and it should not be framed that way. It can assemble a comparison — who has current documents, who came in on schedule last time, whose quotes have moved — from records you already hold. Selecting a trade partner is a judgement about capability and trust.
It can draft and schedule reminders. Sending unattended messages on your behalf to trade partners is a choice with relationship consequences, and most contractors who try full automation dial it back to draft-and-review within a month.
No. It sits on top of whatever you use and does the reading and drafting. If you have no system at all, the sequencing side is covered in a quoting workflow for a two-person contractor.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you whether AI pays for itself here.
