Treat dispatch as constraint satisfaction rather than prediction. Software is good at matching a job to the nearest available contractor with the right skill and the right paperwork — provided the paperwork is expressed as data. In Ontario the hard constraints are licensing (electrical and fuels work are restricted by law), workers’ compensation coverage, insurance, and the notice a tenant is entitled to before anyone walks in. Get those four into fields and the routing takes care of itself.
Key takeaways
Most dispatch software fails for an unglamorous reason: the constraints that actually decide who can be sent live in a folder of PDFs rather than in the system. Once a contractor record carries trade, licence number, licence expiry, insurance expiry, WSIB clearance expiry and service area as structured fields, matching becomes ordinary logic. The model’s job is upstream — reading the request and proposing which trade it needs — and downstream, drafting the instructions. The middle is arithmetic.
Start with who is allowed to do the work. Skilled Trades Ontario states that in Ontario, there are 23 compulsory trades, with plumber, electrician, steamfitter and hairstylist among the examples, and that to work in one you must hold a valid Certificate of Qualification, Provisional Certificate of Qualification, or Registered Training Agreement. It adds that journeypersons in compulsory trades must renew their Certificate of Qualification each year and that qualifications can be checked on the public register. Annual renewal is the operative detail for a dispatch system: a compliant contractor becomes a non-compliant one on a date, without anybody doing anything.
Electrical is stricter still. The Electrical Safety Authority is unambiguous that in Ontario only electrical contractors licensed by ESA may do electrical work for hire, and that obtaining a licence is mandatory for all Electrical Contractors and Master Electricians in Ontario. To hold the licence a contractor must be a Master Electrician, or have at least one Master Electrician working for them at all times, have an address for service in Ontario, and carry public liability and property damage insurance coverage of at least $2,000,000, as well as being registered with the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board where required. That is four data points you can store and check automatically.
Fuel-burning appliances have their own gatekeeper. The Technical Standards and Safety Authority states that registered fuels contractors are the only businesses that are legally authorized to do fuels related work in Ontario, and publishes a searchable registry of companies with valid registration — noting that the tool is updated at the beginning of each month. Monthly refresh is exactly the sort of cadence a scheduled job should mirror, rather than a person checking once at onboarding and never again.
Workers’ compensation status is where portfolios most often carry silent exposure. The WSIB explains that a clearance is a unique number issued by the WSIB to registered businesses, which shows that a business, contractor or subcontractor is registered and up-to-date with us, including keeping current with premium payment and reporting, and that only registered businesses in good standing can obtain a clearance. Critically for system design, this clearance number is valid for all your contracts and is valid for up to 90 days. You can also sign up to automatically receive a clearance certificate each time one is created or renewed, which is the difference between a workflow that self-maintains and one that quietly rots.
Note also that not every contractor can produce one: the WSIB observes that some businesses might not be obligated to register with the WSIB, and therefore would not be eligible for a clearance certificate. Your rule set needs a defensible path for that case rather than a hard block, and the classification question underneath it is a real legal one — our sister firm explains how an Ontario business tells an employee from an independent contractor.
The contractor record, expressed as fields
Identity and scope. Legal name, trades performed, compulsory-trade certificate numbers and renewal dates, ESA contractor licence number, TSSA registration number.
Risk. Public liability limit and policy expiry, WSIB clearance number and expiry, workplace safety incident history.
Service. Geography, standard hours, out-of-hours availability, callout minimum, rate card, average time to attend.
Automated checks. Any record with an expiry inside 30 days is flagged; anything expired is excluded from matching outright rather than surfaced with a warning nobody reads.
A trade arriving at a locked door is a wasted callout and, if they let themselves in, a legal problem. The LTB’s guideline sets out the default clearly: the landlord can enter a rental unit between 8:00 am and 8:00 pm if they have given the tenant a written notice of entry at least 24 hours in advance to repair or to inspect the unit where reasonable, and a written notice of entry must specify the date, time and the reason for entering the rental unit. The Divisional Court has held that the notice of entry must specify an actual time of entry — a broad window of time, in that case six hours, during which the landlord may enter is not sufficient. So the dispatch engine cannot simply book “Tuesday afternoon”; it has to commit to a time, which in turn constrains how you sequence a route.
One relief worth building in: entry without notice is permitted where the tenant consents at the time the landlord enters the rental unit, and a landlord does not need to serve the tenant with a notice of entry to enter common areas like hallways in apartment buildings or kitchens in rooming houses. That means common-area work can be scheduled freely, and in-unit work cannot. Splitting the job queue on that single question removes most of the friction.
Three things, none of which is the decision. It reads the tenant’s description and proposes the trade and likely parts. It drafts the work instruction, the entry notice and the tenant message from templates. And it summarises history — this unit has had three drain calls in a year, this contractor’s average attendance has slipped — so a coordinator sees the pattern without running a report. Vendor selection itself should stay rule-driven and auditable, because if a dispatch ever has to be explained, “the model preferred them” is not an explanation.
There is a safety dimension too. Sending the wrong trade is not only inefficient; it can put someone in front of a hazard they are not equipped for. The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety frames risk assessment as the overall process of identifying hazards, assessing the risk of hazards, and prioritizing hazards associated with a specific activity, task, or job, weighing the probability or likelihood of harm from exposure and the potential consequence or severity of harm. A dispatch rule that refuses to auto-assign anything tagged gas, confined space, asbestos or working at height is applying exactly that logic.
The following is illustrative — a composite of how the workflow is usually assembled, not a measured result.
A 400-unit portfolio holds 26 contractor records with structured licence, insurance and clearance fields. A nightly job re-checks every expiry; anything inside 30 days emails the contractor and flags the record, and anything expired is removed from the matching pool. When a work order is released, the engine filters the pool by trade, geography and availability, ranks by attendance history and rate, and proposes two names.
The coordinator picks one. The system then generates three documents from the same record: the contractor’s instruction with the photo and access notes, the tenant’s 24-hour notice of entry stating the reason and a fixed 10:00 a.m. attendance, and a calendar hold. If the job is tagged electrical, the pool is restricted to records carrying a current ESA contractor licence before any other criterion is applied — not as a preference the ranking might outweigh, but as a filter.
The gain is not that anyone chose better. It is that no unlicensed contractor was ever in the list to choose from, and the entry notice existed before the van was booked.
For a defined emergency list and a standing on-call contractor, yes — that is a rule, not a judgment. Everything else should wait for a person, because out-of-hours decisions are exactly when the constraint checks matter most and supervision is thinnest.
Treat the check as running at assignment and at attendance, not once. Annual certificate renewal and 90-day clearance validity mean a long-running job can start compliant and finish otherwise. Re-checking at attendance costs nothing once the fields exist.
The licensing and coverage rules do — they attach to the work, not the tenure. What changes is who instructs and who pays, and in a condominium that follows the declaration and the corporation’s contracts. Our sister firm sets out what an Ontario condominium management company is actually responsible for.
Upstream of dispatch is intake — see turning a tenant photo into a work order. Downstream is planning, so the same trade is not called back three times: preventive maintenance that schedules itself.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you whether AI pays for itself here.
