Getting contractor work into your record

Most of a facility budget is spent by people who do not work for you. The invoice tells you what they charged. Almost nothing tells you what they did, which is why the annual contract review is opinion against opinion.

Why portals fail

The standard answer is a contractor portal. Portals fail for a simple reason: no contractor wants an account in twelve customers’ systems, and the small firms doing your best work are the least likely to comply. What you get is a portal used by your two largest suppliers and nobody else.

A link is a much smaller ask

Send the job as a link that opens on the phone they already have, with the location, the steps and the photographs already there. No account, no app, no password. It produces an identical record and it gets used, which the portal does not.

Ask for the same four things you ask your own team

• •Arrival and departure, recorded rather than claimed
• •What was found, in a sentence
• •A photograph of the work
• •Anything still outstanding, and what it needs

The measures that survive a contract conversation

None of these require the contractor to do anything unusual. They require you to record the visit the same way you record your own work.

• •Attendance against the window that was agreed
• •Time on site, recorded at arrival and departure
• •Evidence rate: the proportion of visits that left photographs
• •Repeat rate: how often the same fault comes back within ninety days

Use it to reward, not only to police

The fastest way to get contractors recording their work is for the record to be worth something to them. A contractor who consistently leaves good evidence should be winning more of your work, and should be told that is why. That conversation changes behaviour across a supply chain faster than any clause in a contract.

Handle the certificates separately

Insurance, competency and qualification documents have expiry dates and belong on the contractor rather than on the job. Diary the expiry, not the renewal, and stop work going to anybody whose cover lapsed last month. That check is cheap and the alternative is discovering it after an incident.