What paperwork do main contractors check before they hand you work?

There is a stage of winning subcontract work that nobody enjoys and almost nobody prepares for. Before your price is read, before anyone looks at your programme, somebody in a commercial or health and safety office is working through a form and a folder of your certificates, deciding whether you are allowed to be considered at all.

I have sat on the subcontractor side of that process on ventilation packages, and the pattern is always the same. The firms that get through are not the ones with the best paperwork. They are the ones whose paperwork is ready, current and easy to hand over in one go.

Why does the paperwork decide it before the price does?

Because the person checking it is not the person who wants to buy your work. Prequalification is a filter, run by someone whose job is to remove risk from the supply chain, not to find you the job. They are ticking boxes against a list, usually with no reason to chase you and no way to hear your explanation.

That changes what "good" means. You are not being judged on how impressive the documents are. You are being judged on whether the box can be ticked today. A perfectly good policy that arrives on Thursday when the deadline was Tuesday scores exactly the same as no policy at all.

What do they ask for, almost every time?

The wording varies by contractor and portal, but the list underneath is remarkably consistent.

Company identity. Registered name, company number, registered address, VAT registration, and CIS status where it applies. These need to match each other and match the name on your invoices. Mismatches here cause more delay than anything else on the list.

Insurance. Employers' liability, public liability, and professional indemnity where you carry any design responsibility. What matters is that the certificates are in date at the point they are read, and that the cover meets whatever the contract asks for. Ask your broker to confirm that against the specific requirement rather than assuming.

Health and safety. A current health and safety policy, sample risk assessments and method statements, accident and incident records, and often evidence of how you manage your own subcontractors.

A recognised accreditation. Most main contractors accept assessment through one of the established schemes rather than doing the full assessment themselves. If you already hold one, keep it current, because a lapsed certificate is worse than none: it looks like something slipped.

Competence and training. Cards, tickets and qualifications for the people who will actually be on site, plus how you record that they are still valid.

Track record. Recent projects of a comparable type and size, and references somebody can ring. This is the part small firms undersell most.

Quality and environmental procedures. How you check your own work, how you handle snags, how you deal with waste and materials. Increasingly this is asked in more detail than it used to be.

Where do firms usually fall down?

Rarely on capability. Almost always on admin.

Certificates expire quietly. Insurance renews in March, the pack still holds last year's document in October, and nobody notices until a submission bounces back.

The documents live in three inboxes and a phone, so somebody rebuilds the pack from scratch every time. That is why it takes two days and why one item always goes missing.

The trading name on the website does not match the registered name on the certificates, so the checker cannot tell whether the insurance belongs to the company being assessed.

The method statements are generic. If a RAMS reads like it was downloaded and had a project name typed into it, it tells the reader you will do the same on site.

And nobody owns it, so it degrades between tenders and gets rebuilt under pressure every time.

What does your website have to do with any of it?

More than most people expect, because the paperwork check is not the first thing that happens. Before a package goes out, a buyer or project manager searches your company to work out whether you are worth inviting. If what they find is thin, out of date, or gives no sign of the sector you actually work in, you may never receive the form at all. That is a quiet loss, and you will never hear about it.

A page that names your accreditations, states the insurance you hold, and shows real projects of the right type does two jobs at once. It gets you invited, and it answers half the prequalification questions before the form is opened. We go into what to put where in RAMS, accreditations and insurance on your site.

How do you make this a twenty minute job?

Treat the pack as a standing asset rather than something you assemble per tender.

Keep one folder, in one place, with one naming convention that includes the expiry date in the file name. Anyone should be able to see at a glance what is about to lapse.

Put every renewal date in a calendar with a reminder a month ahead. Insurance, accreditation, tickets, all of it.

Give it one owner. It does not have to be you, but it has to be somebody.

Keep a short capability statement alongside it: what you do, where you work, typical package size, recent projects, referees. That single document answers a surprising number of questions and gets you taken seriously faster than a price does.

Share it as a link rather than a pile of attachments. A shared folder or a simple client area means the recipient always sees the current version, and you stop emailing files that go stale the moment you send them. That is the same argument behind whether you need a client portal.

What wins it after the paperwork passes?

Evidence that you deliver, recorded as you go rather than reconstructed at the end. Photographs at each stage, checks signed off while the work is still accessible, and a handover pack that arrives complete.

That is worth more than any certificate, because it is the thing main contractors are actually worried about. It is also the argument behind checking ventilation work in stages rather than at completion, and the reason we build ventilation QA and handover tooling around evidence captured on site.

Where to start

If you suspect you are being filtered out before the form ever reaches you, look at what a buyer sees. Run the free site audit for an instant check on the technical basics and on whether your site gives a main contractor any reason to shortlist you.

If you are tendering to main contractors regularly and the pack is still being rebuilt by hand every time, see how we work with contractors and developers and we will look at where that time is actually going.