Tracking Employee and Subcontractor Licenses: Who Owns What
Every license has three kinds of people around it: the person who holds it, the person who chases its renewal, and the people who only need to know. Tracking goes wrong when one person is silently all three, or when nobody is the second one. The fix is to name each role per license, and to give every license one named owner.
This guide covers how to do that for employees and subcontractors in ContractorLicenseAlert, including people who never log in, documents that come from outside, and what to do when someone leaves.
What are the three kinds of people around a license?
The holder is whose name is on it: an employee with a trade license, or a subcontractor whose insurance certificate you keep on file. The owner, or assignee, is the person on your team who makes sure it gets renewed. The followers are everyone else who should hear about it, such as a supervisor, a bonding agent or an operations manager.
In the product these map to different things. The holder and followers are people in the directory, linked to the license. The assignee is a team member with a login. Keeping them distinct is what lets a sub be reminded without being able to touch your records.
Why does every license need one named owner?
A reminder sent to a group is a reminder nobody acts on. If an electrician’s license and his sub’s certificate both have the office manager named as owner, there is a person to ask when it slips. A license with no assignee does not go unremembered: its reminders go to the account owners. That is a safety net, not a plan, so treat a license with no assignee as unfinished setup.
Illustrative rule of thumb: one assignee per license, and no assignee carrying more renewals than they can realistically chase in a month. If your office manager owns all 200 licenses, spread the load or add a second team member.
How do you track people who never log in?
Add them to the People directory: employees, subcontractors, vendors, customers and suppliers can all be entered by hand or imported from Excel or CSV. Link each license to its holder and they are reminded about it, by default at 9:00 in their own time zone, as one email per reminder or a daily digest. They need no account, and archiving them stops the emails without deleting history.
This keeps your team seat count (25 on Pro) for people who actually do the work, and it means turnover among seasonal staff and subs does not create login clean-up.
How do you collect documents from outside people?
Create an upload link from the license and send it to the holder, with a validity of one week, two weeks, 30 or 60 days. They open it with no account, upload a PDF, photo or spreadsheet, and the submission waits for you to review before anything on the license changes. The directory reminds people; the upload link gets the paper back. Use both together for a subcontractor’s insurance: reminder first, link when the renewal is due.
How do team roles work?
There are two: owner and team member. Owners invite and remove people, change roles, run settings and billing, and receive overdue follow-ups for every license. Team members add, edit and renew licenses, upload documents and send upload links. Watchers and supervisors are not roles; they are directory contacts who follow licenses. Sensitive actions, such as changing the team, billing, settings and deleting a license, ask for a fresh two-factor code if you have not given one in the last 15 minutes.
What should you do when someone leaves?
Removing a team member ends their access at once, and reminders for their licenses fall back to the account owners. The licenses still name the person who left, so reassign each one deliberately. Do it before removal if you can: list what is assigned to them, hand each license to its new owner, and clean up any extra recipient entries with their address.
Go deeper
- Owner vs team member: exactly what each role can do, and why watchers are a separate idea.
- Tracking licenses for people who never log in: setting up directory entries and how reminders reach them.
- When a team member leaves: what the system does automatically and the handover checklist.
- Collecting a renewed certificate with an upload link: the step-by-step and when it beats email.
Owner vs team member: who can do what
Related guides in other areas
Track license expiration dates
Move licenses out of a spreadsheet
Give every license an owner
List the licenses that currently have no named owner and assign each one, then add the holders who never log in to the directory. See how teams and the directory work, and how a contractor tracks the subs it hires.