The contractor induction register,
usable straight off this page.

A contractor induction register is the list of every person permitted to work on your sites, when each was inducted, for which site, and what was verified about them at the time. It is not the induction and it is not the daily sign-in sheet. Those three documents get conflated constantly and each answers a question the other two cannot.

• The induction is the conversation, covering this site's hazards, rules and emergency arrangements. What belongs in it, and the sign-off form the inductee and the inductor put their names to at the end of it, is on the site induction checklist and form.
• The register is the record that the conversation happened, with whom, on what date, and what tickets, licences and insurances were sighted. It is what this page is about.
• The sign-in record is who was physically on site on a given day. An incident investigation will want it alongside the register, not instead of it.

The register does one thing neither of the others can, and it is the reason to keep it properly rather than adequately. Because it carries expiry dates, it can answer a question about today: which of the people currently permitted on your sites are working on a lapsed licence, an expired ticket or an insurance certificate that ran out in March. No induction session and no sign-in book can tell you that.

The concept behind all of this, and why residential builders end up carrying these duties whether or not they think of themselves as running a safety system, is covered in site inductions, and the statements the register keeps track of are covered in safe work method statements. Everything here is general information, not legal advice, and requirements differ by state.

Eleven columns. The first six are identification and the rest are currency, which is where registers usually thin out and where they are usually needed.

• Name. The individual, not the company. A register of businesses cannot answer who was on site, which is the question that gets asked.
• Company and ABN. Who they work for and who you contracted with, which is not always the same entity and matters when it is not.
• Trade or role. What they are on site to do, because it decides which safe work method statements are relevant to them and which licences you should be looking at.
• Site or job. An induction is site-specific. A register that records someone as generally inducted has recorded a credential that does not exist, and it will not help when the question is about this address.
• Date inducted, and by whom. Both. The name of the person who conducted it is what turns the entry from an assertion into something a person can be asked about.
• Construction induction card number. The White Card details, sighted rather than reported. A number written down from a photo of the card is worth considerably more than a number read out over the phone.
• High-risk work licence classes and expiries. Scaffolding, rigging, forklift, elevating work platform and any other licensed class relevant to their work, each with its expiry date.
• Trade licence and expiry. Where the work is licensed, the licence number and its expiry, which is a commercial exposure as much as a safety one on residential work.
• Insurance currency and expiry. Public liability, and workers compensation where the subcontractor has workers. Record the expiry date, not just that a certificate was received.
• Safe work method statements provided, with version. Which ones were given and discussed, and which version. A statement that has since been revised means the induction covered a document that is no longer the one in force.
• Acknowledgement, and the re-induction date. The person's signed or recorded confirmation that they received and understood the induction, and the date they are next due. An entry with no acknowledgement records what you did, not what they received, and only one of those is evidence.

The failure is rarely an absent register. It is a register that exists and does not establish anything when it is finally read. Three versions of this turn up repeatedly on residential jobs, and all three are cheap to prevent and impossible to fix afterwards.

The first is the unacknowledged entry. A row recording that a person was inducted, in the builder's handwriting, with no signature and no recorded confirmation from the person. It records that the builder says the induction happened. It is not nothing, and it is a long way short of what a signed acknowledgement would have been, and the difference costs about fifteen seconds at the time.

The second is the register with no version of what was covered. Six months later the question is not whether an induction occurred but whether it covered the hazard that caused the incident, and a register that names no safe work method statement version, and points at no checklist, cannot answer it. This is the argument for keeping the register and the induction checklist as a matched pair, with the register naming what the checklist covered on that date.

The third is the register that was true once. Every ticket and certificate on it was current when it was written down, and nothing has looked at it since. Licences lapse, insurance certificates run out, and safe work method statements get revised, all silently and none on a schedule that anyone announces. A register with expiry dates and nothing watching them produces a specific kind of false confidence, because the check has visibly been done and is now, quietly, out of date.

None of this needs software to fix. It needs the entry made while the person is standing in front of you, the acknowledgement captured at the same moment, and something in the calendar pointed at the earliest expiry. What software changes is the arithmetic when the register is holding forty trades across five sites, at which point watching expiries by hand stops being a discipline problem and becomes a capacity one.

To reference this page, use the wording below and link the page rather than copying it, so readers reach the current version. Corrections to hello@viabuild.au.