Contractor and Supplier Records for Landlords
The plumber you call at midnight should not be a name in your phone. What landlords should keep about each contractor and supplier, and how to link their work to properties.
Every landlord builds up a list of contractors: a plumber, an electrician, a cleaner, a locksmith, a gas engineer, a handyman who does a bit of everything. Usually that list lives in a phone's contacts and a stack of invoices. It works until something goes wrong: a repair fails, a tenant is injured, an insurer asks who did the work, or you need someone qualified at short notice. A contractor record should tell you who they are, whether they are allowed and insured to do the job, and what they have done at which property.
What to keep for each contractor
- Identity: business name, contact person, phone, email, address, and any business or tax registration you need for payments.
- Trade and qualifications: what they do and any licence or registration required for that work where you are, with number and expiry date.
- Insurance: public liability and any other cover, with a copy of the certificate and its expiry date.
- Terms: call-out and hourly rates, emergency availability, payment terms, and any agreement you signed.
- Bank details, and a note of how you verified them. Change requests should be confirmed by phone on a number already on file.
- Access arrangements: whether they hold keys or codes for any property.
Expiry dates are the point
A qualification or insurance certificate that expired last month is worse than useless if you rely on it. Record each expiry as a date, set a reminder a few weeks before, and ask for the renewed certificate. Where the law requires a registered professional for certain work, such as gas or electrical safety, check your jurisdiction's rules and keep the evidence of registration with the job. Our guide to safety certificates and compliance records covers the property side.
Link every job to the property
The contractor record answers "who"; the property record answers "what was done here". Each job should be recorded against the property or tenancy: the tenant's report, the instruction, the quote, before-and-after photos, the invoice and any certificate. That is the trail you need for a deposit dispute, an insurance claim or a warranty call-back. We walked through it in maintenance requests from tenant report to invoice.
Review contractors once a year
- Check every active contractor's insurance and qualifications are current.
- Look at the jobs they did: repeat call-outs for the same fault are a signal.
- Compare rates across contractors in the same trade.
- Remove anyone you no longer use, and collect any keys they hold.
How this fits in Herarx
In Herarx a contractor is a contact, a company or a person, that can be linked to many cases in a role such as "Plumber" or "Contractor". Open the contact and you see every property and job they are linked to. Certificates are files; expiry dates can be tracked dates that appear on the calendar. On a property or repair case, a table can hold one row per job with the contractor, cost and invoice, so the property's maintenance history builds itself as you work.
Keep only what you need
Contractor records often include personal data for sole traders. Keep what the relationship needs, and when you stop using someone, apply the same retention thinking as any other record: keep what supports past jobs and payments for as long as those could be questioned, and delete the rest.
