Your Trades' Licences and Insurance: The Risk on a Spreadsheet
Published 9 August 2026 · 4 minute read
6–10
disconnected platforms commonly run by agencies
Indium market research
$1,838
median AAMI per property, eastern seaboard, FY2025
Real Estate Dynamics, FY2025
Somewhere in your agency is a spreadsheet of trades, last updated by someone who may no longer work there. Every job you dispatch is a quiet bet that the licences and insurance on that spreadsheet are still current. Nobody checks, because checking is nobody's job.
Is our electrician's licence even current?
If you can't answer that question in under a minute, the honest answer is "we don't know" — and "we don't know" is the answer you'd be giving after an incident, to people far less friendly than a colleague. Licences lapse, insurance policies expire mid-year, and businesses change hands while the trading name stays the same. The tradesperson you vetted three years ago is a different risk today.
The uncomfortable truth: collecting a certificate of currency once, at onboarding, is compliance theatre. Documents expire on their own schedule, not yours. A check without a recheck is a photograph of a moving object.
Why the spreadsheet always fails
The spreadsheet fails because it's disconnected from the moment of risk. The risk isn't holding stale data — it's dispatching a job to a trade whose cover has lapsed, and the spreadsheet isn't consulted at dispatch. It lives in a shared drive; work orders live somewhere else entirely. Agencies commonly run six to ten disconnected platforms, and the trades list is usually the least loved corner of the sprawl.
It also fails socially. A spreadsheet has no owner, no reminder, and no consequence for going stale. Updating it is always someone's fifth priority, which means over time it's nobody's. The document rots at exactly the rate everyone assumes someone else is maintaining it.
What is actually at stake for the agency?
The stakes run in three layers. First, the incident itself: uninsured or unlicensed work that goes wrong at a managed property, with the agency in the chain of decisions that put that trade on site. Anything in that territory is a matter for your insurer and your lawyer, not a blog post — treat it as [ESCALATE] territory in real life too.
Second, the owner relationship. An owner who discovers work was done by an unverified trade doesn't parse fault finely; they conclude the agency is sloppy, and at a median AAMI of roughly $1,838 per property, each management that walks is real money. Third, the compounding effect: trades problems cluster, and the agencies that discover one stale record usually discover a folder of them.
What does a real trades register look like?
A real trades register is a system of record, not a list. Each trade carries their licence details, insurance certificates, and expiry dates — and the register does something a spreadsheet cannot: it acts on those dates. Expiring documents trigger a request to the trade before they lapse. Expired ones change the trade's status automatically.
The defining feature is enforcement at dispatch. If a trade's insurance has expired, the system should make that visible — or make the dispatch impossible — at the moment someone tries to send them a job. That single connection, between the document's status and the work order, is the difference between a filing cabinet and a control.
Make the trades do the paperwork
The chore that kills trades compliance is the chasing, so design it out. The renewal request should go to the trade automatically as expiry approaches, with a simple way to submit the new certificate — no phone tag, no email archaeology. Trades renew their insurance anyway; forwarding a certificate is trivial when the ask arrives at the right moment through a channel that doesn't require a login they'll never remember.
This is how Indium's trades register works, and it pairs with maintenance dispatch needing no trade login: low friction for the trade, verified currency for the agency. Trades who repeatedly won't produce documents are telling you something worth hearing. Believe them, and dispatch accordingly.
The sixty-minute audit worth doing this week
Take your ten most-used trades and check three things: licence current (most states have public registers you can search in minutes), certificate of currency on file and unexpired, and the business entity on the certificate matching the entity you actually pay. That last one catches the quiet restructures where the cover belongs to a company that no longer does the work.
Expect surprises — most agencies find at least one. Then fix the system rather than the spreadsheet: put expiry dates somewhere that alerts someone, tie verification to dispatch, and make renewal the trade's job. The goal isn't a cleaner list. It's making "is our sparkie's licence current" a question the system answers before anyone has to ask it.
Quick answers
How often should trade licences and insurance be checked?
Continuously, in effect: track expiry dates and re-verify at each renewal, not just at onboarding. A certificate collected once is only evidence of that day. The practical fix is a register that alerts before documents lapse.
What documents should an agency hold for every trade?
Current licence details appropriate to the work, a certificate of currency for their insurance, and confirmation that the insured entity matches the business you actually engage and pay. All with expiry dates recorded and monitored.
What's wrong with keeping trade compliance on a spreadsheet?
It's disconnected from dispatch, so nothing stops a job going to a lapsed trade. It also has no owner and no alerts, so it goes stale silently. A register tied to work orders closes both gaps.
Keep going
General information for Australian agencies, current at the date above — not legal or financial advice. Verify obligations against AUSTRAC guidance and your own advisers.