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Reminders and expiry

It tells you before it
expires, not afterwards.

Every certificate, insurance policy, calibration, MOT, health assessment and service date in the business sits in a register that is checked overnight. Subcontractors whose insurance has lapsed are taken out of approved status automatically, without anybody having to notice, which is the difference between a system that warns and a system that acts.

62 automatic demotions 12 registers, one page thirty day forward window it runs without you
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
What the engine does

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

Automatic
demotion

01

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

02

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

03

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

04

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

05

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

06

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, and what
that figure does and
does not mean.

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.

What 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.
What we will not say
That 62 subcontractors are currently suspended. 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. Saying 62 are suspended would overstate it, and the distinction is the sort of thing a careful buyer checks.
Why 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.
What 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.
And 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 Because a figure you can pick apart is worth less than a smaller one you cannot Counted in the construction deployment, July 2026
Compliance paperwork and certificates on a desk
279Supplier documents under watch
204Subcontractor insurance policies
463Training and e-learning records

Counted in the construction deployment, July 2026. Alongside 141 subcontractor certificates, 84 accreditations, 80 health assessments, 55 instruments, 376 assets and 9 vehicles.

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.
What it does not do

Five things, and the first
is the one most firms
assume is configurable.

01
Lead times are not configurable
The registers use a thirty day warning band and the general reminders job uses seven days, and those figures are set in the code rather than on a settings page. Thirty days is right for a supplier policy and probably wrong for a scheme accreditation that takes eight weeks to renew. Making lead times configurable per register is a standard piece of tailoring and it is exactly the sort of adjustment the engagement covers, but it is not a switch you would find yourself.
02
No escalation ladder
Overdue items keep appearing on the dashboard and keep being counted, and general reminders keep emailing once a day until they are marked complete. What does not happen is a manager being copied automatically after a set number of days. It is a common request and a small piece of work on the existing jobs.
03
No mobile reminders and no text messages
Certificate and insurance expiry does not reach the app. Telephone numbers are stored against register rows and displayed, and nothing in the reminder path sends a text message. The push infrastructure exists and is heavily used by other parts of the platform, so extending it to compliance expiry is small work, and today it is not done.
04
Only subcontractors get automatic action
Everything else notifies. The subcontractor certificate and insurance registers are the two that take action by changing status. Applying the same pattern elsewhere, for example flagging an instrument unusable once its calibration expires or blocking an allocation to an operative whose ticket has lapsed, is an obvious extension and it follows the same proven mechanism.
05
Two registers are built and unused
Water testing and filter changes are complete, live menu items, read by the dashboard and driven by the same machinery. In the construction deployment they hold no records, because that business tracks water hygiene elsewhere. They are proven in the site services deployment. We present them as platform capability rather than as evidenced usage in a system where they are empty.

The engine wrote to 34 subcontractor records on its most recent run. These five are where the edges are.

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.+
Not out of the box today. The registers use a thirty day band and the general reminders job uses seven days, and those figures are set in the code rather than in a settings page. Making the lead times configurable per register is a standard piece of tailoring work and exactly the sort of adjustment a Unibuild engagement covers. We would rather tell you that plainly than let you find it after signing and treat it as a change request.
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?+
Not automatically today. Overdue items keep appearing on the dashboard and keep being counted, and general reminders keep emailing once a day until they are marked complete, but there is no ladder that copies in a manager after a set number of days. It is a common tailoring request and a small piece of work on the jobs that already run.
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 awkward part is normally reconciling the spreadsheet against what you actually hold, and that is worth doing once, at migration, rather than never.
Does it send text messages?+
No. Telephone numbers are stored against register rows and displayed there, and nothing in the reminder path sends a text message. Reminders go by email. Push notifications exist and are heavily used elsewhere in the platform for approvals, and extending them to compliance expiry is a small piece of work that has not been done. If a text channel matters to your operation we would scope it as an addition rather than imply it exists.
Next step

Every business knows which
certificates it cannot
properly account for.

The only question Whether you find out six weeks early or during somebody else's audit That is the whole product