Why insurance certificates need their own tracking, not just licences

Ask most GCs what they check before a subcontractor starts work and the answer starts with "licence" — and that’s the right instinct, but it’s incomplete. Public Liability Insurance and Workers Compensation Insurance are their own separate compliance documents, with their own expiry dates, their own renewal cycles, and no relationship to whether that subcontractor’s trade licence happens to still be valid. A current licence and a lapsed insurance certificate is a completely different failure than an expired licence — and it’s the one that’s easier to miss, because it doesn’t come with the same "can this person legally do this trade" red flag a licence problem does.

Why insurance expiry is the quieter failure mode

A licence problem tends to announce itself — a tradie can’t legally hold themselves out as licensed to do the work, and there’s usually a public register to check against. Insurance is different: a subcontractor whose Public Liability cover lapsed last month can still show up, still do the work competently, and nothing about the job itself looks any different. The gap only becomes visible the moment something actually goes wrong on site and there’s no cover behind it — which is exactly the wrong time to discover a certificate expired six weeks ago.

Why company-level reuse makes this worse

Public Liability and Workers Compensation genuinely are company-level documents — unlike a White Card, which has to be verified per individual worker, one current certificate can legitimately cover every tradie a subcontracting company sends to your site. That’s a reasonable design choice, but it means a stale insurance certificate isn’t a per-person gap noticed when a new face turns up — it’s a company-wide gap that can sit unnoticed across every project that subcontractor is on, because nobody’s specifically watching that one document’s own expiry date separately from everything else on file.

What separate tracking actually looks like

The fix isn’t more paperwork, it’s treating insurance expiry as its own tracked item rather than a line buried inside a broader "compliance documents" checklist — its own due date, its own alert, checked against your project’s actual timeline the same way a licence expiry should be, not just confirmed as "not expired today" once at onboarding and left alone.

How Novato handles this

Novato tracks Public Liability Insurance and Workers Compensation Insurance as their own project requirements, each with its own expiry flagged against your project’s own end date — the same timeline-risk logic that catches a trade licence expiring mid-project applies independently to insurance, so a lapsed certificate shows up as its own compliance gap rather than getting lost as a subordinate detail under a company’s licence status.