Frequently asked questions

It verifies that the contractors your firm engages hold a current trade licence and the insurance their trade is expected to hold, and it keeps verifying. Licences are checked against the government register that issued them. Insurance certificates are checked against the requirements we maintain for each trade type. Contractors are onboarded and chased by us rather than by your team, and every check is recorded and date time stamped.

No. TradeVerify verifies information against government registries. It is not itself a registry, a government service or a licensing authority, and it cannot issue, vary, suspend or reinstate a licence. If you need to change something about a licence, that is a matter for the authority that issued it.

No, and any vendor telling you otherwise is overselling. TradeVerify provides verification, monitoring and an audit trail. It does not certify, warrant or guarantee that any contractor or managing agent is compliant. What it gives you is an accurate, current, evidenced picture of what a contractor holds — the decision to engage them remains yours.

Licensing is State and Territory based, so coverage is not uniform across Australia. We read from the Australian Business Register, the Building and Plumbing Commission, Queensland Building and Construction Commission, NSW Fair Trading, Consumer and Business Services (SA), Access Canberra. As well as WA Building and Energy, Tasmania (CBOS) and NT Licensing. The full table, naming each authority and what its status means, is under how it works.

A licence confirmed by the register is valid until its expiry date, so re-asking the same question daily tells us nothing new. We check again as expiry approaches, and whenever something changes that could affect it — a new ABN status, a cancellation, a new trade added.

Yes. TradeVerify maintains the requirements for each trade and industry — what a plumber, a roofer or a fire services contractor is expected to hold — and checks what the contractor actually holds against that standard. You don't build a matrix or decide what's adequate for a trade you've never engaged. We don't advise contractors on what cover to buy, and engaging them remains your firm's decision.

The management firm that engaged the contractor sees that contractor's compliance status, the underlying licence and insurance details, and the verification history. Contractors are not visible to firms that have not engaged them. How we handle personal information is set out in the privacy policy.

That is the intended way to use it. Compliance information is written back into the system your team already works in, through a direct integration, so there is no second system to check and nothing to reconcile by hand.

Most property management platforms expose an API, and integrations are built based upon your current configuration — so tell us what you operate on and we'll plan the connection. In the meantime TradeVerify runs alongside your system: your panel is maintained here, and checking a trade before you send them is a look, not a second data-entry job.

We do not publish pricing, because it depends on portfolio size and how many contractors you engage. What is fixed is the structure, and verification is free for contractors. Book a demo and we will give you a figure against your actual numbers.

The document is read automatically first, using extraction built for Australian certificates of currency rather than a general-purpose document reader, and it is classified before it is trusted — a tax invoice for a premium, a quote, a renewal notice and a premium funding agreement all look like insurance paperwork and none of them establishes that cover is in force.

What is read is then checked against the record: the named insured has to be the contractor's registered entity, the cover has to meet the requirement for their trade, and the policy has to be current. All three line up and it verifies. Any one of them doesn't — a policy in a related but different entity's name, a cover short of the requirement, a wording that doesn't map cleanly — and it stops and comes to us. A person resolves it, not your team.

No. Those are work health and safety exercises, and they are a different job from the one TradeVerify does. We confirm that the entity is real, that the trade licence is current with the authority that issued it, and that the insurance held meets the requirement set for that trade — and we keep that current. We do not collect safe work method statements, run inductions, or assess a contractor's safety systems. If your firm needs that as well, it needs it from somewhere else.

It does not pass. We check the licence number against the register for that State first. If that returns nothing, we work through the ABN, then the registered entity names, then the trading names in the States the contractor services. Anything short of an exact match on the number, the ABN or the name isn't verified — a shared trading name is exactly how one business's licence ends up on another business's file.

Most firms are operational within a few days. Our team handles the setup and imports your existing contractor data, so you are not starting from a blank register.

No. TradeVerify handles contractor outreach. Contractors are contacted, guided through submission, and sent reminders when documents are due. Your team is not in that loop.

Contractors receive automated reminders before expiry. If a contractor becomes non-compliant, their status changes and that change is reflected in your management software through the integration, so your records stay accurate without anyone updating them by hand.

They already are different. We maintain what each trade type is expected to hold, so a fire safety contractor and a cleaner are not assessed against the same list, and you are not building that matrix yourself. Where your firm's own policy differs from the baseline, you set it and that becomes the rule we check against. We do not advise on whether those requirements are adequate for a given scheme.

Yes. Every verification is timestamped and shows where the answer came from — the register that issued the licence, or the document the contractor supplied — and the history is retained. That record is what you hand over when someone asks you to demonstrate due diligence, rather than reconstructing it from an inbox months later.

Yes. A contractor's current status is available whenever you need it, including evenings and weekends. That is the case the product is built for — the decision about who to send is made under time pressure, and that is precisely when a document folder is least useful.

Add them and we start the onboarding immediately. They are contacted and guided through verification without your team chasing them. Verification costs the contractor nothing, so the usual reason for refusing does not apply.

Not directly — TradeVerify is a tool for your agency. What it gives you is the record to answer a landlord who asks whether the trade you sent was licensed and insured, with the date of the check and the authority that confirmed it.

No. The work of verifying a trade doesn't scale down — a small agency checks the same registers for the same trades, usually with fewer people to do it.

It replaces the process of collecting, filing and re-chasing them. TradeVerify monitors what the contractor holds against the requirements set for their trade and tells you when something lapses, rather than leaving you with a certificate that was accurate on the day it was issued.

No. Verification is free for contractors. You submit your documents and we notify you when they need renewing. The management firm that engages you pays for the platform.

Work orders and quote requests from management firms are usually issued on behalf of the property owner or the owners corporation. In some cases a committee member or another individual engaged you directly. The firm keeps your details because it manages quotes, work orders and payments for its clients, and it wants its contractor records to be current for any future job.

The firm engaging you has a duty of care to the owners it represents. Before approving contractors for work across its properties it needs to confirm you hold valid compliance records. Without a verified profile, managers in the network may not be able to engage you — not because they don't want to, but because they can't confirm your status.

We contact you more than once, because we know how busy a trade business is. If the documents stay outstanding, firms using TradeVerify may be unable to approve you for work. That is not a penalty — it is simply what an incomplete verification means to the person deciding who to send.

A certificate emailed once tells the firm what was true on the day you sent it. TradeVerify keeps the record current and re-checks the licence against the register, which is what lets the firm approve you without asking you again next time.

Reply to any message we have sent you, or contact us directly. You can ask for a copy of the information we hold about you and ask us to correct it — the privacy policy explains how, and what to do if you are not satisfied with our response.

No. We email you a single-use link with a time limit, and it opens a page listing exactly what is outstanding — including the specific licence or policy reference where something has expired. You upload the document and that is the end of it. There is no password to create, nothing to install, and no cost to you. If the link expires before you get to it, ask us for another one.