Skip to content
HMRC CIS return month ending 5 Aug · due Wed 19 Aug 12 days
CIS return due Wed 19 Aug 12 daysCDM 2015, RIDDOR and the compliance registers, built in rather than bolted onUnlimited users, every module, £0 per helmet30+ modules, one login, and the 15-app stack retiredQuickBooks, OneDrive, WhatsApp and email, wired into the jobGlove-friendly field app, QR-first, timed by the server not the phoneExpired subcontractor insurance drops a firm out of approved status overnightFree migration from whatever you run todayUK built, UK support desk, UK hours30-day free trial, no card, no obligation
Start the 30-day trial
Book a demo→
Subcontractor management

Never instruct an uninsured
subcontractor again.

Unibuild checks every subcontractor certificate and insurance policy overnight. Any company whose cover or accreditation has expired drops out of approved status automatically, which removes them from the order form, the small works form and the labour planner until it is put right. Nobody has to notice anything.

Book a walkthrough → How the expiry engine works
62 automatic demotions 27 numbered conditions on the deed over billing shown in red two signatures, two people
Where subcontract control fails

Insurance certificates live in a
folder and expiry dates live
in one person's head.

March
A firm is instructed onto site whose employers' liability lapsed the previous October. Nobody finds out until a claim or an audit.
Uninsured exposure
The order
A phone call, confirmed by an email saying as discussed, fourteen thousand for the second fix.
No terms at all
Three months on
The final account carries nine thousand of extras nobody in the office recognises.
Argued blind
Twice paid
Two invoices for the same package, one on paper in March and one by email in May. Nothing checked either against the order.
Straight loss
Any day
Nobody can say what the business is committed to across the subcontract ledger, still less what remains outstanding.
Position unknown
The question
Which of our subbies are any good? Answered from opinion, because nothing was ever recorded.
Same mistakes
The mechanism that fixes the first one Enforcement by removal, not by reminder Everything else follows from the register
What is in the module

Six capabilities, and the
first is the best compliance
story in the platform.

Expiry that removes,
not warns

01

Two nightly jobs read every certificate and insurance expiry date on your supply chain and demote any company holding an expired document out of approved status.

  • The reason is written onto the company record
  • They vanish from the subcontract order form
  • From the small works form and the labour planner
  • A contracts manager does not have to notice anything
62 of 164 companies affectedLive

A subcontract,
not a purchase order

02

Two branded A4 pages with 27 numbered conditions and an execution block for director signature and witness.

  • A Housing Grants Act payment mechanism written in
  • Retention terms and release conditions stated
  • Required cover levels filled from the policies on record
  • Most software issues an order. This issues a subcontract
Stands up eighteen months laterLive

Over billing caught
before the payment run

03

Every invoice row shows the parent order value alongside a count and total of every other invoice already raised against that order.

  • Visible before anyone approves it, on the same row
  • The matrix shows ordered, invoiced and paid side by side
  • The bar turns red and reads over billed
  • The payment form refuses more than the invoice it sits against
Before, not afterLive

Two signatures,
two people

04

Orders clear on enforced value bands, and above the top threshold the second approval has to come from somebody else.

  • Because an order you have approved leaves your own queue
  • Committee membership checked against the live user record
  • So a leaver loses authority the moment they are deactivated
  • Segregation of duties by mechanism, not by policy
Enforced in codeLive

Small works,
properly ordered

05

The two day job you gave a local firm on the phone gets a numbered order, an agreed price, an approver and your terms attached.

  • Capped in the system so it cannot become a subcontract
  • A larger package must be raised properly, with retention
  • Approved from a phone by push notification
  • Your terms print with every order, without anybody remembering
The instrument sized for the jobLive

A record of who
actually performed

06

Closing an order out opens a structured evaluation across quality, programme, communication, collaboration, health and safety, budget and problem solving.

  • A mandatory overall score and a would you hire again answer
  • Signed off with the evaluator's name and role
  • Held against the order and reachable from the firm
  • Opinion becomes an attributable record
See the honest note on adoptionLive
About the subcontractor portal

We used to have a page for it.
We took it down.

You may have arrived here from a link to a self service subcontractor portal. Here is exactly why that page no longer exists.

The portal is built
A subcontractor login scoped to their own company, showing the orders you have approved and letting them raise their own invoices against those orders, with the project derived from the order rather than typed. The design is sound and the office side it reads from is in daily production use.
It is not in service
One login has ever been provisioned, for a single subcontracting company, and it has never been used to log in. There is no portal traffic in the access logs at all. Every subcontractor invoice in the live system was created by an office user rather than by a subcontractor.
So we stopped marketing it
A feature nobody has used is not a feature we are going to put on a website with a set of benefits underneath it, however well it is written. Marketing an unproven surface is how a supplier ends up in a demonstration explaining why the page is blank, and it devalues every other claim on the site.
What we would say if you ask
That the subcontract ledger behind it is proven and running, that the portal itself is built and would need proving before we sold it to you, and that if supply chain self service matters to your business we would scope it as work rather than list it as included. The most valuable version of it, letting a subcontractor upload their own renewed insurance certificate against the register that already watches expiry, is not built at all today and is the single strongest addition available to that surface.
Why tell you this Because you would find it out, and the finding out is what costs the trust Not the gap itself
Subcontract trades working on a construction site
164Subcontracting companies on the register
204Insurance policies watched
80Trade classifications in the library

Counted in the construction deployment, July 2026. Alongside 141 certificate records across 49 companies and 272 other supply chain documents.

What the deed actually says

Twenty-seven numbered
conditions, and the ones
that matter commercially.

Nothing here is legal advice, and the terms in your deployment would be your own drafting rather than somebody else's.

Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996
The payment clause sets the application date as the due date, the final date for payment as 35 days after it, requires a Payment Notice within 10 days of an application, permits a Pay Less Notice not less than 2 days before the final date, and gives interest at 4% over Bank of England base rate on late payment. A separate clause provides the dispute resolution and adjudication route.
CDM 2015
The subcontractor is bound to the Regulations and to the directions and information requirements of the appointed Principal Designer, and to making its safety policy and implementing procedures available. The competence evidence behind the appointment sits on the company record with expiry dates, and an expired document removes them from the order form.
Insurance as a contract condition
Required public liability, employers' liability and professional indemnity cover levels are structured fields on the order, auto populated from the policies actually held on record when you select the firm, and printed on the deed. A clause requires those policies to be maintained without unusual exclusions and gives you a right to insure and set the cost off if the subcontractor fails to.
Retention
The percentage and the release conditions are structured fields printed on page one, and the mechanism releases half at practical completion and the balance at the later of the end of the defects liability period or rectification of the last notified defect. Note the limit below: this is a contract term the platform captures and prints, not a running balance it tracks.
Bribery Act 2010 and tax
Clauses bind the subcontractor to your anti bribery policy, require procedures preventing associated persons from engaging in it, and provide an indemnity. A separate clause places sole responsibility for tax and National Insurance liabilities on the subcontractor with an indemnity to you.
Record retention
A clause requires the subcontractor to maintain records for twelve years from completion, with you entitled to request access, tied to your ISO 9001 obligations where you hold that certification.
What it does not do

Five things, and the first is
the first question your
market asks.

01
No CIS handling of any kind
No Unique Taxpayer Reference, no HMRC verification number, no deduction rate, no gross payment status, no payment and deduction statement and no monthly return. Unibuild manages the subcontract itself: the order, the variations, the invoices, the payment position and the insurance and competence currency that decides whether you should be instructing that firm at all. CIS sits with your accounts package. This is the most dangerous available claim in this area and we are not going to make it.
02
No retention ledger
Retention is a contract term the system captures, prints and enforces contractually through the deed. It is not a running balance of what you hold per subcontractor and per project, with release dates diarised. If you carry meaningful retention on the payable side, that is a specific piece of scoped work, and a well understood one because the order terms and the payment records it would draw on already exist.
03
The order limit is captured, not enforced
Each company can carry an order limit on its record. Nothing warns or blocks when an order would take a firm past it. It is displayed only. Enforcing it is a small change with a real control benefit, and we would rather list it here than let it read as a working control on a feature list.
04
The star rating is set by hand
The rating on a company record is typed by a person rather than derived from the completion evaluations. The evaluations are held per order and are genuinely structured, and deriving the register rating from them is an obvious improvement that has not been made. Nothing here calculates a supplier score for you.
05
Chasing a renewal is a person clicking a button
The expiry checking and the demotion are fully automatic and run overnight. The reminder email to the subcontractor asking for the renewed document is sent by somebody pressing a control, to the addresses held against that document. Scheduled chasing at sixty, thirty and seven days before expiry is a natural extension of machinery that already exists elsewhere in the platform, and it is not built here today.

The demotion engine has acted on 62 of 164 companies in a live business. These five are where the edges are.

Questions

Asked by commercial
managers and QSs.

What actually happens when a subcontractor's insurance expires?+
An overnight job reads the expiry dates on the insurance register, finds the lapse, and moves that company from approved back to waiting for approval with the reason recorded against them. Because the subcontract order form, the small works order form and the weekly labour planner all list approved companies only, that name disappears from all three. It comes back when your compliance team loads the renewed certificate and approves the company again. In the construction deployment this control has demoted 62 of 164 companies, 28 for expired certificates and 34 for expired insurance.
Does it handle CIS?+
No, and we would rather say so now than in month three. There is no UTR, no verification number, no deduction rate and no monthly return anywhere in the system. The existing client runs CIS in its accounting package. If you need verification status and deduction handled against the subcontractor record, that is development work we would scope and price with you rather than a box we would tick on a comparison table.
Do you handle retention?+
Partly, and the distinction matters. Retention percentage and release conditions are captured on every order and printed on the deed, and the deed carries a full mechanism releasing half at practical completion and the balance at the end of the defects liability period. What does not exist today is a retention ledger: a running balance of what is held per subcontractor and per project, with release dates. If you carry meaningful retention that is specific scoped work, and it is well understood because the terms and payment records already exist.
Our subbies will not fill anything in.+
They do not have to. Everything described on this page is office side. Your team raises the order, records the variation, enters the invoice and records the payment, exactly as they do now, just in one place instead of four. A self service portal exists in the platform and is not in service, which is set out honestly in its own section above rather than sold to you as a benefit.
We already have all of this in a spreadsheet.+
Most firms do, and the spreadsheet is usually accurate. The difference is that a spreadsheet does not stop anybody. It does not remove a company from a dropdown at two in the morning because a policy expired, it does not refuse a payment larger than the invoice, and it does not require a second person to authorise a large package. The spreadsheet also lives with one person, and that person takes holiday.
Can we set our own approval thresholds?+
The banding mechanism is real and enforced, with two different approvers required above the top band because an order you have already signed drops out of your own queue. The threshold values themselves are set in code rather than on a settings screen today, so your figures are configured during implementation. Making them editable by an administrator is a contained change and we would price it if you want it.
What happens to the subcontractor records we already hold?+
They are loaded during implementation. The register takes company details, bank details, trades, contacts, certificates with expiry dates, insurances with cover values and expiry dates and other documents, so an existing spreadsheet plus a folder of certificates maps onto it directly. Historic orders and invoices are usually better archived than migrated, and we will say so rather than charge you to move them.
Next step

Send us your subcontractor
spreadsheet and one order.

What we will show you The same package running with your order number on it, including what happens when the insurance expires And which parts would be built for you
Book a walkthrough → How expiry is watched
Phone · UK hours
+44 7587 557546
Email
[email protected]
Your sector
Construction and fit-out
Demo calendar
unibuild.co.uk/demo