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HousingSurveyPRO

The contractor directory

Who can do thisPermission: contractors ≥ 1

Contractors is your supply-chain directory: every contractor you work with, their trades, insurance and accreditation, and one entry point for adding them — however much detail you have on day one.

What it is

Every contractor you add is its own separate organisation on the platform, ring-fenced from yours — they only ever see the work you send them, never your stock or another contractor’s evidence. Adding a contractor never blocks you from dispatching work to them immediately, whatever stage their own account is at.

Before you start

Adding a contractor requires member-management permission.

How to do it

  1. Open Contractors from the sidebar and click + Add contractor.
  2. Choose whether this is an external firm (they run their own organisation, or you set one up for them) or an in-house contractor surveyor (a sub-contractor with no account of their own, who signs in as one of your own surveyors and consumes one of your surveyor seats).
  3. For an external firm, enter the company name — email and phone are optional — and save. The contractor appears in your list immediately, and work orders can be sent to them straight away.
  4. Add full company detail — trades, regions, insurance and accreditation expiry dates, which drive automatic expiry warnings — at any time by opening the entry and editing it.
  5. To bulk-load your supply chain, use Import CSV from the toolbar.

How it integrates

An external firm you add without full detail carries a status chip that tracks its lifecycle:

Chip Meaning
Unclaimed You added them (name only, or with credentials issued); nobody at the contractor has taken the account over yet. Work orders still send normally.
Invited — awaiting validation You added them with an email address and they’ve been sent an invite. Work orders still send normally.
Credentials issued — unclaimed You generated a sign-in for them to use directly; they haven’t yet claimed the account as their own.
Active A contractor running their own account, linked to yours.
Suspended You suspended them — no new work orders can be sent until you reactivate.

A contractor claims their shell by signing in, adding and verifying their own email under Settings → My account, and signing in again — at which point the account becomes theirs alone and you can no longer revoke or regenerate its credentials. You can hold at most 25 unclaimed shells at once; claimed contractors don’t count towards that limit. Every add, invite, credential and claim action lands in your organisation’s audit log.

Common problems

  • I need to send work today but the contractor hasn’t set up their account. You don’t need to wait — a blind add (name only) or issued credentials both let you dispatch work immediately.
  • The contractor’s “email” bounces or they never check it. Use Issue sign-in credentials instead of an email invite — it generates a sign-in you hand to them directly, with no email sent.
  • I can’t revoke a contractor’s credentials any more. Once they’ve claimed the account with their own verified email, revoke and regenerate are refused — an independent business can’t be locked out of its own account by the landlord who created the shell.