Site compliance: a document wallet, not a folder of PDFs

Every small civil business has the folder. It is on a shared drive, it is called something like "SUBBIE DOCS", and it contains 200 PDFs with names like scan_002.pdf. Nobody knows which insurance certificate is current. When the head contractor asks for the crew's tickets before Monday, someone loses an evening.

The folder is not the problem. The model behind it is: it assumes documents belong to the company holding the folder. They do not. A white card belongs to the person who earned it, an insurance certificate belongs to the business that bought it, and both of them are also needed by three other companies this year.

The wallet model

In the SitesAI App a document belongs to its holder — the person or the company it is actually about — and is shared with the businesses that need to see it.

That one change fixes several things at once:

A worker keeps one wallet. Someone who works for three businesses uploads their ticket once and shares it with each. When they renew it, they renew it in one place. No more three companies each holding a different, differently-out-of-date photo of the same card.

You see what was shared with you, not everything. A company sees a member's document when it has been shared, through a site submission or an ad-hoc share. There are two sensible exceptions: a person's direct supervisor can always see their reports' documents, and admins see the company's own.

Approved means frozen. This is the part that matters in a dispute. While a share is live, the document's content cannot be edited or archived underneath you — the version you approved stays the version you approved. Updating is a renewal: a new version goes out, and the old share remains in your archive as the record of what was true at the time.

Leavers stop nagging you. When a connection is made inactive, that person's expiry dates drop out of your warnings. They are not your problem any more, and your compliance screen should not pretend otherwise.

Requirements belong to the site

Rather than one global checklist, each site carries its own list of what it needs, and each requirement has a scope: something the company must hold, or something each member must hold. Public infrastructure work and a residential subdivision do not need the same paperwork, and the system should not force you to pretend they do.

Add the requirements to the site, and a contractor granted access to that site sees "documents this site needs from you" on the site page. They submit from their wallet. Workers can submit their own.

One screen that answers the question

The question is always the same: who is not compliant, on what, right now? The site compliance report answers it directly, and each submission is accepted or rejected with a note, so a rejection tells the subcontractor what to fix instead of leaving them guessing.

There is also a company-wide view, and dashboard tiles for admins: documents expiring within 30 days, submissions waiting for review, and documents this site needs from us. Expiry is evaluated at the time you look, on Melbourne dates.

Inductions, signed on the phone

A site induction is content plus questions, completed by the worker on their phone with a drawn signature and their typed name. Passing it produces a certificate record, and the worker's induction status flips on the site automatically.

The wiring goes both ways, which sounds minor and is not: it works whether the person is assigned to the site and then completes the induction, or completes it first and is assigned afterwards. Only a manual revoke by the owner sticks until a fresh completion.

Subcontractors get a narrow door

Granting another company access to your site does not hand them your business. A subcontractor sees only what is assigned to them, planned for them, or offered to their company on that site. Never your catalogue. They can bring their own crew and their own machines onto your site, and submit their own documents against your requirements.

What this is not

It is not a safety consultancy. The app holds Safe Work Method Statements, inductions and SOPs and tracks who has done what; it does not write your SWMS or tell you whether it is any good.

It is also not an approvals workflow engine with fifteen states. A requirement is mandatory, a submission is submitted, accepted or rejected, and that is the whole vocabulary — on purpose.

Try it on one site

Set up a single site with its real requirements and invite one subcontractor. That is about twenty minutes, and it is enough to know whether the model suits how you work.

The app is free up to ten licences, where a licence is one active team member or one active site. Sign in with Google, Microsoft or Apple at app.sitesai.net, or read Running a small civil crew from one app for how compliance connects to the rest of the job.