The subcontractor portal

Your subbies stop ringing
your accounts office.

A subcontracting company gets one login to their own corner of your system. They read the order you actually issued them, raise their invoice against it themselves, and watch it move from pending to approved to paid. Three pages, scoped to their company alone.

See the subbie portal → The office side of it

3 pages, deliberately thin scoped to their company approved orders only they invoice themselves

What it replaces

Two questions, asked
on a Friday afternoon,
that nobody can answer.

What was I ordered to do, and where is my money. Everything below is your office absorbing the cost of those two questions being hard to answer.

Three months on

The subcontract order was a Word document, emailed once. Nobody can now say what the retention percentage was, or whether professional indemnity cover was a condition.

Unfindable

Every invoice

The subbie invoices on his own numbering with no reference. An accounts clerk spends twenty minutes working out which order it belongs to and which project carries the cost.

20 minutes each

Friday, 4pm

He rings to ask whether his invoice has been passed. Answering means opening three systems, so somebody promises to call back.

Called back Monday

Occasionally

Two invoices for the same work both get paid, because one came in on paper and one by email, and nothing was checking invoice total against order value.

Paid twice

On site

A variation is agreed verbally and appears later as an inflated invoice, with no dated record of what was instructed or what it was worth.

Argued about

At the worst moment

Insurance expires quietly. Somebody notices during a client audit, or at the point a claim is made, that employers' liability lapsed eight months ago.

A real exposure

The mechanism The order stops being a document and becomes a record Everything else follows from that

What the subcontractor sees

Three pages. They do not
see your system, they see
their own corner of it.

Every record on those pages is filtered to their company alone, and the filter is applied server-side from their own account rather than from anything the browser can change.

My Orders

Read only

Their own approved subcontract orders, newest first: order number, project, order value, commencement and target completion dates.

A LIVE badge while open, COMPLETED once you close it out
A numbered badge for each variation recorded, v1, v2, v3
One-click download of the full order PDF
They cannot change a term, a date or a value

Approved orders onlyLive

The order itself,
as a deed

Document

Two A4 pages on your letterhead: the commercial schedule on page one, the sub-contract conditions on page two, ending with the execution block for director signature and witness.

Sub-contract sum, retention percentage and release conditions
Payment terms, programme, site hours, defects liability period
The three required insurance cover levels stated on the order
That is the document they print, sign and return

Generated, not storedLive

My Invoices

Self service

They raise the invoice themselves against one of their own orders, attach their own document and add remarks. The project and job number come from the order rather than being typed.

Order dropdown restricted to orders that belong to them
Edit or delete only while it is still Pending
Correcting a rejected invoice returns it to Pending cleanly
Searchable, exportable to PDF and Excel

Cost lands on the right projectLive

The Friday
afternoon answer

Status

Each invoice row carries two badges: where it is in your approval route, and what has actually been paid against it.

Approval: Pending, Approved or Rejected
Payment: Unpaid, Partly Paid, Paid or Overpaid
Calculated live from the payments your office recorded
The amount is colour coded to match

Nobody has to ring anybodyLive

Scoped to their
company, twice

Access

The login is created from their record in your office, not self-registered. Their account carries the subcontractor company it belongs to, and every query is constrained to it.

Portal pages are served separately from the office ones
An office URL bounces them straight back to their dashboard
Only orders you have approved appear at all
Deactivation blocks the login immediately

One login per companyLive

Expiry that
demotes them

Compliance

Two nightly jobs read the certificate and insurance registers. A subcontractor carrying an expired document is demoted out of Approved status automatically, with the reason recorded.

They stop appearing as a firm you can freely order from
Checked every night rather than every quarter
Registers show days to expiry, with a send-reminder action
Never instruct an uninsured subcontractor again

Office side, but it protects youLive

What happens on your side

The portal is the thin end.
The control is all in
your office.

The portal exposes the two things a subcontractor chases you about. Everything that makes those two things safe sits behind it, where they cannot reach.

The order is approved before they ever see it: Subcontract orders run a value-banded approval route: up to £5,000 a single approval clears it, between £5,000 and £25,000 it needs one approval from the committee, and above that it needs two. A push notification goes to the committee when the order is raised, with a WhatsApp message carrying the order number, project, subcontractor and value. Only an approved order appears in the portal, so they never see one still going through your route, and never see a rejected one.
The overpayment control is a column, not a habit: When their invoice lands in your queue it arrives with the order number attached, and the row shows the order value beside the count and total of every other invoice already raised against that order. The Subcontractor Matrix shows order value against invoiced against paid for every order in one grid. That is how a second invoice for the same work gets caught before it is paid rather than afterwards.
Payments are recorded on the certificate layout: Gross certified, retention, discount taken, net, VAT, materials, tax and the amount actually paid, with a remittance or receipt attached. Each payment produces its own PDF payment certificate. The subcontractor's badge moves as you record them.
The evaluation is yours, and they do not see it: When the works are finished and the order is marked complete, the post-completion evaluation opens: quality, programme, communication, collaboration, health and safety, budget, problem solving, overall performance and would-you-hire-again. That record sits behind the star rating on your subcontractor register. It is deliberately not shown to the subcontractor.

Put plainly They get answers. You keep the controls That is the whole design

Printed subcontract orders and invoices on a desk

164Subcontractors on the register

3Pages the portal exposes

4Payment states on every row

What it does not do

Six things, stated
before you offer it
to a subcontractor.

This is the thinnest surface on the platform, and the one where it would be easiest to imply more than exists. These are the real edges.

They cannot upload their own insurance or certificates

This is the most tempting claim available and it is not supported today. The subcontractor cannot upload or renew their own insurance, certificates or accreditations. What is automated is the expiry check and the demotion out of Approved status, plus a reminder email your office sends. Self-service document upload is the strongest single addition available to this surface, and it is a defined piece of work rather than a switch.

Small works orders are invisible to it

The portal shows, and invoices against, subcontract orders only. If a large share of your subcontract spend goes out as small works orders, those cannot be invoiced through the portal today and will still arrive by email. Exposing them is contained work, and it should be raised at scoping if that is how you buy.

Nothing is notified automatically

Your office is not alerted when an invoice is submitted, and the subcontractor is not alerted when an order is issued, an invoice is approved or rejected, or a payment is recorded. The push, email and dashboard mechanisms all exist elsewhere in the platform, so wiring them here is a known, scoped extension rather than new ground.

The dashboard is a welcome panel

There are no figures on it: no outstanding balance, no count of invoices awaiting approval, no orders due for completion, no document expiry warnings. The two pages either side of it carry the substance. Giving the dashboard content is on the list of sensible additions, and we would rather show you an empty one than describe one that does not exist.

They cannot see or price variations

The variation count appears on their order as a badge, but they cannot open the detail, cannot see what it was valued at, and cannot submit a variation request for you to price. Variations are recorded and priced by your office. They also cannot see the individual payment lines behind the payment badge.

One login per company, and no CIS handling

The login belongs to the subcontracting company, not to a named individual, so there is a single shared account rather than one per contact. Named contacts are held separately for correspondence. Unibuild also does not calculate or file CIS deductions anywhere in the platform, including here. If either matters to you, say so on the first call.

Everything in the six cards above exists in the portal. These six do not.

Questions

The ones asked before a
subcontractor is given a login.

Can a subcontractor see anything belonging to another subcontractor?+

No. The account carries the subcontractor company it belongs to, and the order and invoice queries are constrained to that company from the account itself rather than from anything passed by the browser. Portal pages are served by their own controllers, separate from the office ones, and the access layer sends any subcontractor session that reaches an office page straight back to their own dashboard.

How does a subcontractor get a login?+

You create it. Open the company on your subcontractor register and use Add Login: an email address and a password are set against that company. There is no self-registration, and a duplicate email address is refused so a subcontractor login cannot collide with a staff or client account. The same button reads View Login afterwards, and deactivating the account blocks the login immediately.

What stops them invoicing for more than the order is worth?+

Nothing stops them raising it, and that is the honest answer. What stops it being paid is the control on your side: every invoice arrives against a named order, and your queue shows the order value beside the running total of everything already invoiced against it. The Subcontractor Matrix repeats that across every order. The check is a column your clerk reads rather than a rule the subbie cannot break.

Our subbies are not going to log into another system.+

Some will not, and it is worth being realistic. The ones who do are the ones generating the most work for your accounts office: the firms with the largest ledgers and the most frequent invoices. For everyone else, nothing breaks. Orders still issue as PDFs and invoices still arrive by email into the same queue. The portal removes the chasing where it is taken up, rather than being a condition of trading with you.

Does this replace our subcontractor management?+

No, it is the self-service front of it. The office side holds the trade classifications, the ratings, the approval and blacklisting workflow, the certificate and insurance registers, the accreditation matrix and the post-completion evaluation. The portal exposes only orders and invoices. If you want the full picture of what your office gets, that is a separate page: subcontractor management.

What happens when their insurance expires?+

A nightly job reads the insurance and certificate registers, and any subcontractor carrying an expired document is demoted out of Approved status with the reason written against their record. They stop appearing as a company you can freely order from, which is the point: the control acts on your ordering rather than on their login. The registers also show days to expiry so your compliance manager can chase before it lapses.

Is the portal in both of the businesses running on Unibuild?+

No. It belongs to the construction deployment, where the subcontract ledger is large enough to justify it. The site services business has never had it, because its subcontract spend does not work that way. That is the tailoring argument again: two firms on one platform, each running the half that fits. We would demonstrate the portal in the deployment that carries the real orders.

The platform