Compliance documents

Public liability, workers compensation, professional indemnity, trade licences, ISO certificates. Every organisation on a project has a folder of them somewhere, every one of them expires, and the question a host has to be able to answer is which subcontractors are currently covered and which are not.

Teralo splits that into two halves that meet in the middle. Your organisation keeps its own documents in one place with their expiry dates. A project host sets out what the project requires, and each organisation on the project submits against those requirements. Nobody re-uploads the same insurance certificate for the fifth job this year.

Your organisation's documents

Under Settings, the Compliance Documents card is your organisation's own library. Each document has a name, a category of insurance, licence, certification or other, the file itself, and an expiry date.

The card colours what is coming: a document expiring within thirty days shows Upcoming in amber, and one whose date has passed shows Overdue. A document with no expiry date is simply never either.

When a policy is renewed, use Renew rather than editing the dates on the existing entry. Renewing creates the new document and links the old one to it as superseded, which keeps last year's certificate available while taking it out of the way. Editing the old record in place is how an organisation loses its ability to prove what cover it had on the day something happened.

What a project requires

A project host defines its requirements in project Settings: a name, a category, and whether the requirement is mandatory or optional. Teralo offers the common ones as a starting point, public liability, workers compensation, professional indemnity, a trade licence and ISO certification, and you can name anything else the job needs.

Requirements apply to every organisation on the project, which raises the obvious problem: not every requirement is relevant to every subcontractor.

Exemptions

An exemption excuses one organisation from one requirement, with a reason recorded against it. The requirement disappears from that organisation's list and stops counting towards their compliance status, and the exemption can be revoked later. There is one exemption per organisation per requirement, so there is never a question of which of two applies.

Use it rather than making a requirement optional for everybody. Optional is a statement about the requirement; an exemption is a decision about one subcontractor, and it is the one that leaves a reason behind.

Submitting against a requirement

Each organisation sees what the project is asking of it in My Items, on the Compliance tab, which counts how many mandatory requirements are still unmet. There is nothing to hunt for: if the project wants something from you, that count is on the same page as the rest of your outstanding work. See My Items.

Submitting offers two routes. Choose from library picks a document out of your organisation's own set, and copies its expiry date across. Upload New File attaches a file directly to this requirement, with the expiry date typed in.

The first is the better habit by a distance. A document submitted from your library is the same record on every project it satisfies, so renewing it once is a renewal everywhere. A file uploaded directly to a requirement is a copy, and it will still be sitting there at last year's expiry date long after the policy behind it was replaced.

The compliance status

The Organisations tab of the project Directory carries a Compliance column, and that is where a host reads the whole picture at once. Each organisation shows one of:

• A dash, where the project has no requirements at all
• Missing, where a mandatory requirement has nothing submitted against it
• Overdue, where something submitted has passed its expiry date
• Upcoming, where everything is in place but something expires within thirty days
• Compliant, where everything mandatory is submitted and in date

Only mandatory requirements count, and exempted ones are skipped. Optional requirements are visible and chaseable but never make an organisation non-compliant, which is what makes them worth having rather than making everything mandatory and then ignoring half the column.

What this does not do

Two things this tool is often expected to do and does not, both worth knowing before you rely on it.

It does not gate site access. An overdue insurance certificate shows as overdue; it does not stop anybody signing in. Site access runs off inductions, which have their own licence records and their own expiry handling, and the two systems are separate. If you need a lapsed insurer to keep people off site, that is a conversation, not a setting.

It is not the same as contract compliance. Contracts have their own compliance requirements, defined per contract against their own document types, and those genuinely do block something: a progress claim cannot be approved while a required contract compliance document is missing or unverified. That is a different set of requirements, held against the contract rather than the project, and satisfying one does not satisfy the other.

Where all this lives

There is no Tools page for this one, and no sidebar item. Both halves live in Settings: your organisation's documents under organisation Settings, and the project's requirements under project Settings. See Organisation level and project level for the general shape of that split.

Who can do what

There is no compliance permission in the permission templates, which is the practical consequence of this not being a tool in the catalogue. Access is decided by membership instead, in three places:

• Your organisation's own documents are open to any member of that organisation
• A project's requirements and exemptions are restricted to members of the host organisation, so a subcontractor can never edit what is being asked of them or exempt themselves from it
• Submitting against a requirement is open to anybody on the project, on behalf of their own organisation

That last one is looser than it first looks and deliberately so. Requirements go unmet for weeks when the only person who can upload a certificate is an administrator who is not the person holding it. See How permissions work for the model this sits outside of.