Use cases by sector
The company working inside someone else's site
Your work happens somewhere that is not yours, with people inside and under someone else's rules. The paperwork arrives before the technician does.
You clean a hospital, maintain a factory's machines, run a school canteen or service a shopping centre's lifts. **The work is yours; the site, the rules and the door are not.** That asymmetry turns something that looks administrative —what paperwork you hold— into the condition for invoicing on Monday.
What they ask for before letting anyone in
| Who asks | What for | What happens if it is missing |
|---|---|---|
| The site | Company documentation | No supplier record is opened |
| The site | Documentation for each person entering | The company is approved and the technician is not |
| The site | Documentation for the equipment brought in | The machine stays on the loading bay |
| **Their client or auditor** | **The same, months later** | **They come back to you for it** |
Important
**The distinction almost nobody draws early, and the one that decides whether this holds: there is COMPANY, PERSON and EQUIPMENT documentation, and only the first is stable.** Company papers renew once a year and serve every site. Person papers expire on their own schedule, change whenever someone new joins, and must be ready *before* that person is put on the job. Equipment papers travel with the machine, and the machine moves between sites without telling anyone.
Why it fails, when it fails
- 1
Monday's technician was decided on Friday
The rota outranks the archive, and the archive finds out afterwards.
- 2
Every site wants the same thing under another name, in another portal
Five clients, five formats, five different renewal dates.
- 3
Expiry is silent
Nobody notices anything until someone is stopped at the door.
- 4
Whoever holds the document is not whoever uploads it
The technician has it on their phone; the person managing the portal is at the office.
Watch out
The costliest failure in this position is not a missing document: **it is that the service goes ahead anyway and the paperwork follows later**. The technician gets in because the guard knows them, does the job, and weeks later a review asks what cover they entered under that day. By then it cannot be fixed backwards. A document uploaded after the day it claims to cover does not cover that day — it only proves you knew.
Worth knowing
What documentation may be required for site access, what coordination duties exist between the occupying company and those working there, and what training or health surveillance applies to each role **is settled by your prevention service or adviser**, and varies by sector and country. Here we cover the part that decides whether you can answer in time: who holds what, dated when, and who finds out before it expires.
›Can I send the same documents to every client?
Company ones, usually. Person ones depend on who you assign to each site.
›What if the site insists on its own portal?
It will keep insisting. What you can avoid is holding the original in five places and none of them current.
›How far in advance is needed?
Before the person is on the rota, not before they reach the door.
A real case
The situation
A technician is stopped at the door because their training lapsed last month.
What you do
- Warns about expiry ahead of time, per person rather than per company
What you get
Renewal happens before it hits the rota.
The situation
Five clients ask for the same documents through five different portals.
What you do
- Keeps a single current original and serves every client from it
What you get
All five are answered without redoing the work five times.
The situation
Someone new joins the service and nobody knows whether their papers are complete.
What you do
- Checks per person what is missing before assigning them to a site
What you get
Onboarding stops being discovered at the client's door.
The situation
The site asks months later what cover applied on a specific day.
What you do
- Keeps each document with its date and who it covered
What you get
The answer comes out of the archive instead of being reconstructed.
The situation
A machine is brought on site and its documentation sits somewhere else.
What you do
- Stores equipment documentation with the equipment, not with the contract
What you get
What travels with the machine is found where the machine is.
The situation
The technician has the document on their phone and the portal manager cannot see it.
What you do
- Collects the document from where the person is, without going through the office
What you get
The day's lag between holding it and being able to show it disappears.
This article answers
- documents required to work on a client site
- what paperwork do i need for site access
- supplier portal keeps rejecting my documents
- my technician was turned away at the door