Reminders and expiry

It tells you before it
expires, not afterwards.

Every certificate, insurance policy, calibration and service date sits in a register checked overnight. Subcontractors whose insurance has lapsed drop out of approved status automatically.

See the reminders engine in a demo → Ask for a quote

Twelve expiry registers checked overnight in Unibuild

Why this exists

It is not ignorance.
It is capacity.

Every business knows this is a risk. There is simply no hour in the week that belongs to checking eighteen registers by hand.

The auditor asks

For a subcontractor's public liability certificate. It expired four months ago and they have been on site throughout.

Your insurance position

A full week

An engineer works on gas appliances with a scheme registration that lapsed on the first of the month.

Certificates in doubt

February to August

An instrument's calibration ran out and it carried on being used. Six months of results are unsupportable.

Retesting

Monday morning

A van goes out with an expired MOT. The driver did not know. The office did not know.

The insurer takes a view

The spreadsheet

Formulas colour cells red. Nobody opens the file unless they are already looking for something.

Watched by nobody

Onboarding, once

Supplier certificates collected at the start and never refreshed. Presentable on day one, worthless in two years.

Stale evidence

The distinction that matters A certificate proves compliance on the day it was issued Only monitoring proves it today

Subcontractor insuranceSubcontractor certificatesSupplier documentsStaff certificatesTraining matrixE-learningHealth assessmentsHAVSDSECalibrationVehicle MOTVehicle serviceAccreditationsCompany insurancesWater testingFilter changesMaintenance due Subcontractor insuranceSubcontractor certificatesSupplier documentsStaff certificatesTraining matrixE-learningHealth assessmentsHAVSDSECalibrationVehicle MOTVehicle serviceAccreditationsCompany insurancesWater testingFilter changesMaintenance due

What the engine does

Six things, and the first one is the reason this page exists.

Automatic
demotion

Two overnight jobs read every subcontractor certificate and insurance expiry date and drop any company holding an expired document out of approved status, with the reason written onto the record.

They then disappear from the subcontract order form
From the small works order form
And from the weekly labour planner
This is enforcement, not a notification to ignore

62 of 164 companies affectedLive

Twelve registers,
one page

One dashboard collapses every expiry register in the business into a single view of what falls due in the next thirty days and what has already lapsed.

Each section with its own count badge
Day counts printed on each card
An explicit all clear panel where nothing is due
Which reads as reassurance rather than an empty page

One page, not elevenLive

The same three
band rule

Every register uses one visual language, so nobody has to learn a second one.

Grey beyond thirty days
Amber inside thirty days
Red with a day count once expired
A bell icon only where action is needed

Consistent across the platformLive

Chasing in
two minutes

Press the reminder control on any row and the email is already written: the right recipients, the document name, the expiry date and the days remaining.

Recipients held per record, not one central mailbox
So a renewal notice does not die with one person's inbox
The send is stamped back onto the row
So nobody chases twice and the file shows it happened

One sentence and sendLive

It runs
without you

The scheduled jobs need no login and no user session. They ran last night and they will run during the week your compliance manager is on annual leave.

A process that depends on somebody opening a file
Stops working the week that person is away
34 subcontractor records written on the most recent run
Every email logged in full with its send result

Not a habit somebody has to formLive

Nothing falls
between registers

Staff certificates, training matrix dates and e-learning completions merge into one deduplicated list, most overdue first, and new date columns are discovered automatically.

So a course added next year appears without a code change
Filterable by person, by source or by status
Each row linking back to where it is managed
Leavers suppressed so the view stays about live staff

Built because things did fallLive

The number, stated precisely

Sixty-two, stated exactly.

This is the best evidence on the whole website that compliance
automation is doing real work rather than sitting dormant,
so it is worth stating it exactly rather than roundly.

01What is true: 62 subcontractor records out of 164 carry an automatic demotion stamp written by the nightly jobs: 28 for an expired certificate and 34 for expired insurance. Each one records the reason on the company record.
02Where they stand now: Of those 62, 43 are still held out of approved status and 18 have since been re-approved by a person after the firm produced a replacement document.
03Why the 18 matter more than the 43: Because they demonstrate the full loop working rather than just the enforcement half: automatic demotion, human chase, replacement document, human re-approval. A system that only demotes produces a register full of blocked firms and a workaround. This one produces a cycle.
04What the engine actually finds: Across the registers as at the read date: 47 expired supplier documents, 63 expired staff health assessments, 47 expired subcontractor insurance records, 37 expired subcontractor certificates, 11 expired accreditation certificates and one expired calibration certificate. All visible and counted rather than unknown. It also showed 29 instrument calibrations falling due inside thirty days, which is a month of work seen before any of it becomes a problem.
05And the clean ones: Zero expired vehicle MOTs and zero expired e-learning records, on a fleet and a training population that are both actively monitored. Those two zeroes are the outcome the mechanism exists to produce, and they are worth quoting alongside the failures rather than instead of them.

Why the precision Every figure here counted, not rounded Counted in the construction deployment, July 2026

The design detail worth noticing

Automation that quietly undoes
a commercial decision is
worse than no automation.

Blacklisted firms are left alone: The expiry jobs explicitly refuse to touch a blacklisted subcontractor. If your business has deliberately decided not to work with somebody, an overnight process is not going to reverse that decision by moving them into a queue where they look like a normal renewal.
Nobody is prompted to chase a firm you have dropped: The register pages hide blacklisted and archived companies, so a chase list never contains somebody your directors have already ruled out. That sounds small until the first time an administrator emails a renewal request to a firm the business fell out with.
The demotion is recorded, not silent: The reason is written onto the company record and stays in the history even after re-approval, which is useful evidence that the check was being made continuously rather than once at onboarding. Under CDM 2015 that continuity is the point.
The throttle: The general reminders job emails the assigned staff for anything due within seven days or already overdue, and throttles itself to one email per reminder per day, so a chased item does not become noise that people learn to filter.

Blacklisted subcontractors excluded from expiry automation in Unibuild

Questions

Asked by whoever owns
compliance in your business.

Does it actually do anything, or just send emails nobody reads?

Both, and the difference matters. Most of the registers notify: they show amber at thirty days, red once expired, and let you email the holder from the record. The subcontractor certificate and insurance registers go further and take action. Any subcontractor whose latest certificate or insurance has passed its expiry date is automatically moved out of approved status overnight, with the reason written onto their record, which removes them from every form you would have used to instruct them. On the system Unibuild was built on, 62 of 164 subcontractor records carry that automatic stamp.

Can we set our own warning periods? We want ninety days on insurance.

Yes. The warning period is set to suit the register and the client, so ninety days on insurance sits alongside a shorter band on something that renews quickly. The defaults are a thirty day band on the registers and seven days on general reminders. Your own lead times per register are set up during implementation, inside the monthly fee.

If a subcontractor gets demoted automatically, how do we put it right?

You update the expiry date on the register once they send the new certificate, and re-approve them on their record. It is a two minute job. The demotion stamp stays in the history, which is useful evidence that the check was being made continuously rather than once at onboarding. In the live system 18 of the 62 demoted companies have been through exactly that cycle and are back in service.

Will it escalate if somebody ignores a reminder?

Yes. Overdue items keep appearing on the dashboard and keep being counted, and escalation routes them to the person above once a date has passed. General reminders keep emailing once a day until they are marked complete. Copying a manager in after a set number of days is set up to suit your firm.

We already use a pre-qualification scheme. Does this duplicate it?

No, it tracks it. The scheme membership itself is one of the certificate types held per subcontractor, with its expiry date, and the overnight job acts on that date. What the scheme cannot do is tell you that a specific subcontractor's employers' liability expired last Thursday and stop your team raising them an order on Friday. That is what this does.

What happens to the certificate dates we already hold in a spreadsheet?

They are loaded into the registers as part of implementation, with the document files attached where you have them. The registers are deliberately simple in structure, being a name, a holder, an expiry date and a recipient list, so the import is usually straightforward from whatever shape your current spreadsheet is in. The larger job is usually reconciling the spreadsheet against what you actually hold, and that is worth doing once, at migration, rather than never.

Does it send text messages?

Reminders go by email and by push notification in your own app, and push notifications are one of the most used features on the platform. Telephone numbers are stored and displayed against the register rows. If your people live on text, or on WhatsApp, that is the channel we build your reminders onto. Which events chase whom, on what channel and how many days out, is set to your firm rather than to a default somebody else chose.

By trade

Who leans on this hardest?

Trades carrying so many dates that no one person can hold them: a statutory clock on the order, an examination on the machine, and a card in somebody pocket.