Your certificate lapsed on a Tuesday. You found out on a Friday.

You didn't lose the job because of your work. You lost it because a piece of paper expired and nobody told you in time.

That's the uncomfortable truth I want to start with. Not because it's dramatic. Because it's ordinary. It happens to solo trade contractors every week, and it happens quietly, which is worse.

The Tuesday nobody warned you about

Picture the electrician who works three general contractors at once. One wants a million in general liability. Another wants workers' comp added as a rider. A third wants him listed as an additional insured on their policy, renewed every year, no exceptions.

He's not tracking three certificates. He's tracking three relationships, each with its own rules, each changing without warning. His broker is helpful but slow. His calendar has a reminder that says "insurance stuff," set six months ago, already ignored twice.

Then Tuesday comes. The certificate on file with GC number two expired Monday night. Nobody flagged it because nobody was watching it. He finds out Friday, standing at the gate, when the site supervisor tells him he can't come in until it's sorted.

He didn't do anything wrong. He just didn't have a system that reconciles paper against reality before reality shows up and asks.

The wider truth: nothing stays reconciled on its own

I spent years as a Chartered Accountant before I built anything with a keyboard. Here's what that job taught me, and it applies far outside accounting: a ledger that isn't checked regularly doesn't stay accurate. It drifts. Small gaps become real gaps. And the moment you finally look, the gap is already a problem, not a warning.

Insurance compliance for a solo tradesperson is exactly that kind of ledger. Except instead of debits and credits, it's certificates and expiry dates, and instead of one company's books, it's every general contractor he answers to, each with a different requirement, each on a different clock.

Nobody reconciles a relationship until it breaks. That's true of insurance. It's true of client accounts. It's true of most systems humans build and then stop watching. The fix isn't more vigilance. Vigilance is exactly what gets tired and forgets. The fix is something that watches on your behalf, every day, without needing to be reminded to remind you.

What SubCompliance removes

SubCompliance is a certificate-of-insurance and compliance tracker built specifically for solo trade contractors managing multiple general contractor relationships.

It tracks every GC relationship you have, not as a single file but as its own set of requirements. It watches the expiry dates and warns you before anything lapses, not after. And when something needs renewing, it drafts the actual request to your broker, the one you'd otherwise sit down and write yourself at nine at night after a full day on site.

That last part matters most to me. The problem was never that people don't know insurance can lapse. They know. The problem is the gap between knowing and acting: finding the policy number, remembering the GC's exact wording, writing the email, sending it before the deadline instead of after. SubCompliance removes that gap. It doesn't add a dashboard you have to check. It does the checking, then hands you a draft you just have to send.

That's the whole idea behind how I build things. Innovation isn't stacking more features onto a problem. It's finding the step that shouldn't exist and taking it out. The step that shouldn't exist here is you remembering, tracking, and drafting, all by hand, across every GC, every year. That step is gone now.

The honest part

My machine built this. Not a team, not months of sprints. Part of an ecosystem I run called ZeroOrigine, where autonomous systems identify a real, narrow problem and build the tool for it directly. SubCompliance just launched. It does the job described above: tracking relationships, watching expiry, drafting broker requests. It isn't trying to be a full business management suite, and I won't pretend it is. It's built for one specific ache, the one where a solo tradesperson gets caught off guard by paperwork that was always going to expire, on a date that was always known, if only someone had been watching.

I'd rather tell you exactly what it does than oversell what it might do someday. That's the CA in me. I respect what reconciles. I don't respect what only looks good in a pitch.

Try it

If you're the person juggling certificates across two, three, four general contractors, and you're tired of finding out about a lapse from someone at a gate instead of from your own system, this is built for you.

Open the tool

What's the certificate you're most worried about right now, the one sitting in the back of your mind that you haven't checked this month? Reply and tell me. I read every one, and it tells me exactly where to point the next version of this.