Two document types share a shape that makes them the quiet failures of vendor compliance: trade licenses and inspection certificates. Both expire on schedules nobody in your office chose, both come straight from the vendor with no agent in the middle, and both tend to surface only when something else goes wrong.
What the two have in common
A certificate of insurance has a professional whose job includes producing it: the vendor's agent, who answers requests because issuing certificates is part of servicing the account. Licenses and inspection certs have no such person. The license lives in the contractor's wallet or office drawer; the inspection cert is taped inside an elevator panel or filed with the fire company. The chase goes directly to the vendor, who is busy doing the actual work, and it is routinely the slowest chase on the roster.
Both are also documents where a lapse tends to mean something real. An expired license can affect permit eligibility and, depending on your state, the enforceability of the contractor's own contracts. An expired inspection certificate usually means the inspection itself has not happened: a physical-world gap wearing a paperwork costume. A tracking system that flags these is not being fussy about paper; it is often the first party to notice an operational lapse.
Trade and professional licenses
The license landscape varies enormously by state and trade: state-level contractor licensing in some states, county or municipal licensing in others, and trade-specific credentials (electrical, plumbing, HVAC) layered on top, each with its own renewal cycle. Professional licensure for engineers, architects, and surveyors runs on state board schedules with continuing education requirements attached.
For the roster, the variation matters less than the constants:
- Record the license number, the issuing authority, and the expiration date at onboarding, from a copy of the actual license rather than from the proposal's claims.
- Most licensing authorities publish a public lookup. Note the URL alongside the license number; a thirty-second lookup settles most questions faster than a chase.
- Chase renewals on a longer runway than certificates. There is no agent to expedite; 60 days out is a reasonable first request, with patient follow-up.
- For multi-year contracts, note where license renewals fall inside the contract term. A license that was current at award and expires at month fourteen is the standard version of this failure.
Inspection certificates
Elevator inspections, fire suppression system tests, boiler inspections, backflow prevention tests, vehicle inspections for fleets that enter your property: each attaches to a piece of equipment or a facility, runs on a statutory or manufacturer cycle, and is performed by a licensed inspector whose report is the certificate.
Tracking notes specific to inspection certs:
- Anchor the record to the equipment or location as well as the vendor, since the obligation follows the machine.
- The expiration is usually a hard regulatory date, not a soft renewal window. The runway matters: inspections require scheduling a person to a place.
- A red status here deserves a different response than a red certificate of insurance. An expired COI gets a follow-up email; an expired elevator inspection gets a phone call today, because the question is not where the paperwork is but whether the elevator was inspected.
The shared discipline
Both document types reward the same three habits: capture the real document at onboarding rather than a promise of one, put the expiration on a clock with a long runway, and treat a lapse as information about the world, not just about the file. They generate less volume than certificates of insurance, and more of what they generate matters.