Onboarding contractors without the email back-and-forth: a guide for letting, property and block managers (2026)

The hidden cost of onboarding contractors by email

Most letting agents, property managers and block managers onboard contractors the same way, and have done for years: an email asking for insurance and a few certificates, a reply with some attachments, a glance to check nothing has obviously expired, and a row added to a spreadsheet. It works, in the sense that it gets a contractor onto a job. What it does not do is leave you with anything you can rely on a month later.

The problems are quiet ones. The certificate that was current in March has lapsed by August and nobody noticed, because nobody was watching it. The insurance attached was the contractor's old policy, not the one in force, and the difference only matters on the day it matters most. The contractor you onboarded last spring has changed their trading name, and the certificate on file is now in the name of a company that no longer exists. When a tenant queries who was sent to their flat, the answer is a search through three inboxes and a shared drive.

None of this is a single dramatic failure. It is the steady drip of chasing, re-chasing, and never being quite sure your records are current. And on the day something does go wrong on site, the question you will be asked is simple: can you show the contractor was checked before they started, and that the documents were valid at the time? An inbox is a poor answer to that question, because it was never built to be one.

What a structured onboarding looks like instead

The fix is not more diligence applied to the same broken process. It is to make onboarding a defined step with a beginning and an end, rather than an open-ended email thread. You build a reusable onboarding form once, send it to any contractor with a link, and everything they send back lands in one place against their name, with a date, the documents attached, and a record of what was checked.

The contractor opens the link, fills in the form, attaches the documents you asked for, and submits. There is no attachment buried three replies deep, no wondering which version of the insurance you are looking at, and no separate spreadsheet to keep in step with reality. The submission is the record.

The three ways to build your form

Agents do not all start from the same place, so there are three ways to build the form, and the right one depends on what you already have.

Let AI rebuild your existing form. If you already run an onboarding form in Word, and most agencies do, you upload it and it is read and turned into an online questionnaire. The questions you already ask become fields the contractor fills in on screen, and you can edit what it pulls out before you save. This is the route for agents who have a form they are happy with and simply want it working online without retyping it.

Keep your form exactly as it is. Some forms are not yours to change. A managing agent acting for a freeholder, or a firm with a compliance department, often has to use a specific form, word for word. In that case the contractor downloads your form, fills it in, and uploads the completed copy back. Nothing about the document changes - you keep the exact wording you are required to use, and you still get the completed version returned to one place rather than to an inbox.

Build it from scratch. If you are starting fresh, or want to tidy up a form that has grown messy over the years, you add your own questions and the documents you require one by one. This is the route for a clean start, and the one most agents end up refining over time as they learn which questions actually tell them something.

The free account the contractor gets

When a contractor completes your onboarding, they create a free Complys account in the process, using the details they have just entered. That account is deliberately narrow: it lets them upload their own compliance documents and share them. It is not a paid product they have to be sold on, and it is not a set of features they have to learn. It is the by-product of being onboarded once.

This matters more than it first looks. The contractor's insurance, their RAMS, their certifications now live somewhere they control rather than scattered across their own email. The next time you ask for an updated certificate, or a different agent does on a different job, they re-share what they already hold instead of digging through their files for a PDF they last sent in 2024. For you, that is the difference between a cold chase and a quick re-share. For them, it is a reason to keep their own paperwork in order, because it is finally doing something for them.

It also changes the economics of onboarding a contractor you may only use once. The effort is not wasted on a one-off, because the contractor keeps the account and the documents, and the next agent benefits from the vetting you did. The same compliance gets checked once and re-used many times instead of being re-requested from scratch by everyone who needs it.

AI review instead of reading every certificate yourself

The part of onboarding that quietly eats the most time is reading the documents. A contractor submits an insurance certificate, a couple of certifications, perhaps a method statement, and someone has to open each one, work out what it actually is, find the expiry date, check the cover, and decide whether it passes. Do that across a portfolio and a steady flow of new contractors and it becomes a job in itself - the kind of job that gets rushed, and rushed reading is where things are missed.

When a submission comes in, each document is read for you. The review identifies what the document really is, not what it was labelled as, and pulls out the details that decide whether it is any good: the issue and expiry dates, who it covers, the level of cover, the issuing body. Then it gives a verdict you can act on.

An expired certificate is flagged as expired. One that expires within the next month is flagged before it lapses, so a renewal can be chased while there is still time. A document uploaded under the wrong heading, a vehicle photo where proof of identity was asked for, a quotation where an insurance certificate should be, is flagged as the wrong type rather than counted as a box ticked. And if you have set a minimum level of insurance cover for the work, a certificate below that threshold is flagged as falling short, with the shortfall spelled out, rather than passing simply because it is a real certificate for a real, but inadequate, amount.

You still make the decision. The review does the reading and surfaces the problems; you approve, or you send it back. The point is that you are approving against a clear summary of what is current, what is expired, and what needs a second look, instead of against a vague sense that the paperwork looked about right.

When the contractor returns your own form

If you used the keep-as-is route, the contractor returns your completed form rather than answering an online questionnaire, and that returned form is read too. The review checks whether it has been filled in and how complete it is, and flags a form that has come back blank or barely touched. That sounds obvious, but it is exactly the kind of thing a busy reviewer misses, because a returned form carries an unspoken assumption that it must be a completed one. A form that comes back empty, because the contractor opened it, did not save their answers, and re-uploaded the blank original, is caught and flagged rather than filed as done.

Ask for what you will actually check

A good onboarding form is shorter than most agents expect. Every document you require is one the contractor has to provide, you have to review, and you then have to keep current, so asking for things you will never look at adds friction for them and noise for you. The discipline is to require what genuinely bears on the work: public liability insurance at a level that suits the building, the competence evidence the trade demands, a RAMS where the work warrants one, and identity where you are engaging people directly. Set a minimum insurance level only where it matters, so the review flags a shortfall against a real requirement rather than a number plucked from habit. And if your form is one you are obliged to use word for word, keep it as is and let the contractor return it completed - the aim is not to force every agency onto one template, but to make whatever you already ask for arrive checked and on record.

A worked example: onboarding a roofer for a managed block

It helps to see the process end to end. Take a common job: you need a roofing contractor for a managed block of flats, the freeholder requires £5 million of public liability cover, and you have found a firm you want to use.

You send them your roofing onboarding form, which asks for their public liability insurance at a minimum of £5 million, their RAMS for the work, and proof of identity. The contractor gets the link, completes the form, attaches their documents, and submits. In doing so they create their free account, so their details and documents are now held against their name.

The submission is reviewed automatically. The insurance certificate is read: it is the correct type and current, but it shows £1 million of cover, so it is flagged as falling short of the £5 million you required, with the shortfall stated. The RAMS is read and is specific to roof work at height rather than a generic template. The proof of identity is in order. You open the submission and see, at a glance, that everything is fine except the cover.

Rather than approving and hoping, or starting a fresh email thread, you send the submission back asking for a certificate at the right level. The contractor uploads the correct policy, it is reviewed again, the cover now meets your minimum, and you approve. The whole exchange sits on one record, and what you are left with is not a feeling that you checked. It is a documented check showing the cover was wrong, was corrected, and was right before the contractor started.

Keeping contractors current after they are onboarded

Onboarding is only the first day. The harder problem, and the one email never solves, is keeping a contractor current after they are on your books. Insurance renews annually, certifications expire, and a contractor who was perfectly compliant in January can be working uninsured in February without anyone deciding that should happen.

Because each document is read and its expiry date extracted when it is submitted, you are not relying on memory to know when something lapses. And because the contractor holds their own documents in their free account, renewing is a re-share rather than a re-onboard: when their insurance renews, they upload the new certificate to the account they already have, and re-sharing it with you is a single step rather than a fresh request and a fresh chase. The maintenance of the list becomes lighter than the building of it, which is the opposite of how email onboarding ages.

One process across a portfolio

For a single property, onboarding by email is merely annoying. Across a portfolio, with several people instructing contractors and no shared record, it is a genuine risk, because no one person can see who has been checked, when, and against what. A structured onboarding gives everyone the same process and the same record. A contractor onboarded by one of your team is visible to all of them. The form you require for roofing work is the same form every time, so the same things get asked and the same documents get checked, regardless of who sent the invite.

Approved contractors collect into a list you can return to, so the next time you need that trade you are choosing from people you have already vetted rather than starting over. The work of onboarding stops being repeated from zero on every job and starts compounding into something the whole team can lean on.

The record you are left with

Once you approve a contractor, you have something an inbox never gives you: a single record showing who submitted, when, what documents were provided, what the review found, and that you approved. If you ever have to demonstrate that a contractor was vetted before being sent to a property, and that their documents were valid at the time, it is one screen rather than a search and a hope.

That is the real shift, and it is worth being plain about. Onboarding by email is a series of one-off favours to your future self that rarely get repaid - each check helps for a day and then decays. A structured onboarding turns the same effort into a record that keeps working after the contractor has started, stays current with less effort than it took to create, and can be shown to anyone who asks. The effort is roughly the same. What you are left with is not.