Contractor Compliance Software | TradeVerify Platform

Identity

The business, before the paperwork.

A contractor is identified by ABN, not by a name someone typed. Add one and the record is built from the Australian Business Register — entity name, entity type, ACN, status, GST registration, trading and business names, State and postcode.

That matters most after onboarding, not during it. The details a firm relies on are re-read from the register and compared to what we hold, and not every change carries the same weight:

Treated as critical: The entity ceases to be active. The status changes immediately — and in most management systems, a contractor carrying this inactive status can't have a work order or a quote raised against them at all.
Treated as warning: A change of entity name or ACN, or a trading or business name added or removed. Usually benign, occasionally the first visible sign that the entity you engaged is not the entity now doing the work.
Recorded, not raised: Entity type, State, postcode and the ABN's active-from date. Logged so the history is complete, without generating noise.

Every change is written to the contractor's history with what it was, what it became, and when we saw it. A failed lookup is recorded as a failed lookup — we do not overwrite good data because a register was briefly unreachable.

Searching the Australian Business Register by ABN from inside TradeVerify, with the live register result shown — The register is asked live, so the details are current at the moment you add the contractor. Illustrative capture from the platform — sample data.

Confirming an ABR result before adding the contractor: entity name, ABN status, GST registration and entity type — What the register answered, confirmed by a person before anything is created. Illustrative capture from the platform — sample data.

Licences

Checked at the source, and matched before it counts.

Searching a register is the easy half. The hard half is knowing whether the licence you found belongs to the business in front of you — and that is where a compliance tool either earns its keep or quietly manufactures a false positive.

How we search

The licence number against the register for that State first. If that returns nothing: the ABN, then the registered entity names, then every trading and business name the register lists against that ABN.

Scoped to where they work

Results from States the contractor does not service are set aside rather than attached, and reported separately. A plumber working Queensland and New South Wales is assessed against those two areas.

What happens to a match

Verified: An exact match on the licence number, the ABN or the registered name. The compliance record is marked verified, and a plain-language licence record is written naming the authority, the licence number, its classes and its expiry.
Uncertain: Something matches, but not exactly — a name that is close, or a trading name more than one business uses. This does not pass. The record is held short of verified and a task is raised for a person to look at it, because a shared trading name is exactly how one business's licence ends up on another's file.
Rejected: The ABN contradicts, or nothing matches at all. Nothing is attached to the contractor. The attempt is still logged, so the absence of a licence is itself evidenced.

A registry answer alone doesn't settle it. An exact match verifies immediately; anything short of that is held and worked by our team until it resolves. The register tells us what it holds, not who we should trust.

A contractor record with licences found via registry APIs shown as verified chips, alongside the compliance files held against each requirement — One contractor's record: licences answered by the registers, and each compliance file carrying its own state and expiry. Illustrative capture from the platform — sample data.

Registry coverage is a list rather than a claim, because licensing is State and Territory based and there is no national register. Every authority we read from, and the date that list was last confirmed, is in the sources table.

Insurance

Read automatically. Never trusted automatically.

There is no register to ask about insurance. All you have is a document a broker generated, in one of several hundred house styles, and the job is to work out what it actually proves.

TradeVerify reads uploaded certificates and policy schedules automatically, using an extraction model built against a corpus of real Australian certificates of currency rather than a general document reader. It is specific to this market on purpose: dates are read as Australian dates, and a Victorian or South Australian state-scheme workers compensation certificate is understood to be doing the same job as a New South Wales or Queensland policy.

First question: is this even proof of cover?

A tax invoice for a premium, a quote, a renewal notice and a premium funding agreement all look like insurance paperwork. None of them establishes that cover is in force. So the document is classified before it is trusted, and only a policy schedule or a certificate of currency can confirm cover. Everything else is flagged, with the reason stated, and goes to a person.

Then: what does it cover, and who for?

Policy number, insurer, inception and expiry, the named insured parties, and each coverage with its sum insured. Combined wordings are separated into the coverages a firm actually configures requirements against — "public and product liability" is two things, and a policy covering four vehicles is recorded as four items, not one.

Where a wording is genuinely ambiguous, it is not mapped. An unmapped coverage surfaces for review; a guessed one would sit in your register looking like a fact.

Named insured, cross-checked

The parties on the certificate are compared against the contractor's registered entity name and every business name the ABR lists. No match, and the policy is held short of verified with a task raised. A certificate in someone else's name is not cover.

Coverages recognised

Public liability, product liability, professional indemnity, workers compensation, motor vehicle, contract works, cyber and more.

An insurance policy record showing insurer, policy number, inception and expiry, the coverages and limits it declares, and the lapsed flag on the attached certificate — What a certificate was read as: insurer, policy number, dates, each coverage with its limit — and the plain statement that this one has lapsed. Illustrative capture from the platform — sample data.

Extraction is a head start, not a verdict.

What the model reads is recorded as declared by the document, not as fact. Where it lines up with the record — the insured party, the cover, the dates — it verifies. Where it doesn't, or where the wording is ambiguous, it stops and comes to us. The record always shows which is which: what a document claimed, what a system concluded, and what a person decided.

Requirements

The requirements, maintained.

A requirement is a rule: this trade must hold this licence and this cover. We maintain that rule for each trade, so your firm is not building a matrix for a trade it has never engaged. Applying it accurately turns out to be less obvious than it sounds.

Driven by trade: Requirements attach to the trades a contractor is engaged for. A fire safety contractor and a cleaner are not assessed against the same list.
Your policy overrides ours: Where your firm's own policy differs from the baseline we maintain — a higher cover, an extra accreditation for a class of building — you set it, and that becomes the rule we check your contractors against.
Equivalent licences count: "Trade licence" has a different name and form in most States. A State-specific licence satisfies the general requirement it belongs to. The reverse does not hold — where a specific licence is required, only that licence will do.
Exemptions are recorded, not remembered: Some requirements don't apply. A sole trader with no employees can't hold workers compensation. A cleaner who doesn't work at height doesn't need high-risk work accreditation. We exempt the requirement against that contractor with the reason recorded, and the record keeps who did it and when. A blanket exemption nobody can account for later is worse than no exemption.

TradeVerify maintains the requirements for each trade and checks what a contractor holds against them. We don't advise on whether that cover is adequate for a given scheme, we don't advise the contractor on what to buy, and we don't act for them.

Status

One status per contractor, ordered by what you'd fix first.

Every individual licence and policy has its own state. The contractor-level status is the roll-up, and it deliberately surfaces the worst thing rather than an average — an average is how a real problem hides behind four things that are fine.

Contractor-level status, most urgent first. Individual records carry their own state and their own last-checked time.
Status	What it means
Critical	Something previously verified is now past expiry. The most dangerous state, because it was compliant the last time anyone looked.
Non-compliant	A required licence or cover is missing altogether, or has been blocked.
Warning	Something verified expires within seven days.
Action	The document is there but not yet verified — waiting on us, not on you.
Watch	Something verified expires in the next thirty days.
Compliant	Every requirement configured for this contractor is met and current.
Not set up	No trades and no cover requirement, so there is nothing to assess yet. Said plainly rather than shown as compliant.

A firm's dashboard: contractors by compliance status as a donut chart, coverage held, expiring counts and the documents-expiring banner — The same status model in aggregate, across a firm's contractor base. Illustrative capture from the platform — sample data.

The contractor's side

One link. No account, no app, no cost.

Completion rates are the whole game. A register nobody finishes filling in is a spreadsheet with better styling, so the contractor's path is built to remove every reason to abandon it.

No login: The contractor gets a single-use link with a time limit. No password to create, no password to lose, nothing to install.
A specific ask: The page lists exactly what is needed, including which references have expired. Not "please update your compliance documents".
Uploads are screened: Every file is virus-scanned and its type checked on arrival.
Verify once: A contractor's verified record is the same record every firm on TradeVerify reads. They submit to us, not separately to each managing agent who asks.

And it is free for the contractor — the management firm pays. That single fact does more for completion than any amount of chasing. What contractors are asked for.

The contractor upload page: a progress bar, the specific documents requested, and an upload area — no login — What the contractor receives: the exact documents needed, and progress toward done.

The confirmation page after a contractor submits documents, stating they are queued for review — After submitting: queued for review, nothing further needed.

Evidence

Everything above leaves a trace.

Every check, every change, every document read and every decision a person made is recorded against the contractor, with a timestamp and an attribution. System checks are marked as system, so you can tell what a system concluded from what a person confirmed.

The audit trail: dated entries for compliance requests sent, documents marked expired, registry checks completed and permission changes, each attributed to a user or to the system — The audit trail itself. System actions are attributed to the system; decisions are attributed to the person who made them. Illustrative capture from the platform — sample data.

Where it lands

In the system your team already has open.

Contractor data flows in from your management platform, and compliance data flows back out to it, so the person raising a work order sees the status without opening anything else.

Where a Contractor cannot be resolved confidently on the way in, it goes to a review queue rather than being guessed at or dropped. See what we connect to.

The sync review queue: records from the management platform that could not be matched automatically, each with the reason — a name mismatch, a missing ABN, a new supplier — The review queue. A record that cannot be matched confidently waits here with its reason, instead of being guessed at. Illustrative capture from the platform — sample data.

Scope

What we won't claim.

TradeVerify is not a registry and cannot issue, vary or reinstate a licence. It does not certify or guarantee that a contractor is compliant — it gives you an accurate, current, evidenced picture of what they hold, and the decision to engage them stays yours. And if we ever have no registry connection for a jurisdiction, the record says so rather than implying one. The licence is still read and checked — against the contractor's ABR entity, the trade, and its expiry. When it's confirmed from the document rather than from the register, the record distinguishes between the two. The full boundary is set out on how it works.

See it run against one of your own contractors.

The quickest way to judge any of this is to watch it happen to contractors you recognise.

Book a demo See how it works