Vivek Sharma, executive director and founding member at Xpedeon, addresses the wider ‘evidence-readiness’ challenge in construction and how having documents is not the same as having current, accessible and traceable records
2026 has brought further regulatory reform across the construction sector, as government continues work to strengthen accountability, oversight, and consistent regulation across the industry. This direction also places greater emphasis on traceable, reliable information and clear accountability for decisions and actions across the building lifecycle. For large construction businesses operating across complex supply chains and multiple projects, maintaining clear records of decisions, responsibilities and the information supporting them is therefore becoming increasingly important.
The practical challenge is that certificates, accreditations and approval records can sit across procurement, commercial, finance and project teams. Bringing them together to confirm whether a supplier was properly approved for a particular piece of work at a specific point in time can become an operational obstacle if those records aren’t up to date and easy to access. Having a certificate on file doesn’t necessarily show it was valid when work was approved, or that it relates to the right legal entity, project, or package.
When establishing those facts means searching disparate inboxes, comparing spreadsheets and asking colleagues to remember what happened months ago, the business may have the paperwork but be unable to demonstrate the basis for its decision. For a large contractor, those gaps can affect everything from getting a subcontractor onto site to start work to paying a crucial invoice or responding to an auditor by a deadline.
The consequences can also be felt before a project begins. Our Construction Compliance Index 2026, which surveyed 500 senior professionals at UK construction businesses with turnover above £50 million, found that 21% of respondents had lost a tender, been excluded from a bid or been marked down because compliance evidence could not be produced quickly enough. For a bid team working to a tight framework deadline, relying on documents from a previous tender can create problems if an accreditation has since expired or relates to a different scope, making quick access to checked, up-to-date information important from the outset.
Scattered records and problems with same-day evidence
Procurement may hold the insurance certificate, a project manager may approve mobilisation, and finance may create the supplier account, with each team completing its part of the process correctly. However, if a client or auditor later asks why that supplier was allowed to proceed, someone still has to bring those separate actions back together and establish what was checked at the time.
Concerningly, our index found that only 13% said they could produce a complete, audit-ready supplier compliance pack, including a clear approval trail, on the same day. The way this information is managed helps explain why: only 27% use a single platform or process consistently across most projects and business units, while 38% use a mix of platforms and processes across regions and projects. A further 28% rely predominantly on email, spreadsheets and shared drives.
Take an electrical subcontractor used by the same contractor across several regions. Details about the business might appear in the purchasing system, accounts software and individual project folders, while a search of its trading name could return several insurance certificates. Without a consistent supplier identifier, it may not be immediately obvious which belongs to the correct legal entity, which version was accepted or which project it covered.
Evidence gaps become delivery problems
Or consider this. A groundworks contractor due to mobilise next week may have uploaded its insurance months earlier and still appear as an approved supplier, even though the policy expires before the planned start date. If the expiry date sits in one system, project dates in another, and the original approval elsewhere, the paperwork can appear in place without anyone immediately seeing that the insurance will no longer cover the planned start.
Even after procurement has supplied and checked a replacement certificate, problems can continue if the update does not reach the teams relying on it. Confirmation may remain in an email while the accounts system still shows an outstanding document, causing an invoice to be referred for review. Finance then spends time chasing information the business already holds while the supplier waits to be paid.
The index found that 59% of respondents experienced documentation gaps that delayed mobilisation by at least 24 hours in the preceding year, while 51% reported payment delays or invoice holds linked to missing, expired, or unapproved documentation in the preceding three months. What begins as a problem locating or updating information can therefore directly affect project delivery and payment, which can in turn bring real operational, commercial, and even reputational impacts.
Supplier evidence needs to keep pace with the work
The evidence used to approve a subcontractor at the start of a project may not remain valid throughout the work. Insurance policies expire, accreditations change, and a package’s scope can evolve, sometimes creating requirements that weren’t relevant when the supplier was originally appointed.
Keeping an accurate picture means capturing those changes as they happen, including the relevant legal entity, project or package, document validity dates and approval status. It should also be clear who reviewed the information and whether it has been accepted or is still pending, particularly when colleagues elsewhere in the business will rely on it to make informed decisions.
Of course, there will also be occasions when the ‘normal’ process cannot be completed before work needs to progress swiftly. For example, procurement might be waiting for clarification on a certificate while an authorised person has agreed that a supplier can proceed. Capturing what remains outstanding, who authorised the exception, why and when it must be reviewed prevents an unresolved issue from gradually becoming indistinguishable from a standard approval.
If that decision is questioned later, today’s certificate cannot show what information was available when the supplier started. The business needs the version considered at the time alongside the relevant authorisation, rather than relying on colleagues to reconstruct the circumstances afterwards.
What’s more, changes to the work itself can change what is required. A subcontractor originally appointed for a limited package of work could later have its scope expanded to include additional activities, requiring further competence checks or different insurance cover. Linking the revised scope with the relevant checks gives the business a clear account of how the supplier’s position developed as the package changed.
Following supplier information through the project
As a project progresses, procurement, commercial teams and finance will each need different information about the same supplier at different stages. Those teams own the decisions, but the documents and authorisations they rely on must remain available as the subcontractor mobilises, the package develops, and invoices are processed.
This is where an effective construction-specific ERP has a practical role. Bringing commercial, finance, procurement, supply chain, and site workflows together seamlessly means supplier information doesn’t have to be recreated or reconciled each time it moves from one part of the business to another. Onboarding documents can remain linked to subsequent decisions and changes, giving teams access to the same underlying information as the project progresses.
What control looks like in practice
Taking a supplier from a live or recently completed project and tracing it from appointment onwards provides a useful test. Could the business establish which documents were checked before work started, whether they were valid, and who approved them, then track any subsequent changes without piecing the answer together from several different sources?
As scrutiny across construction continues to develop, simply collecting more documentation will have limited value if businesses cannot use it effectively once it is there. For contractors managing multiple projects, suppliers, and internal teams, the stronger position is one where information collected at each stage remains available to the next.
That is ultimately the role effective technology should play. Construction businesses don’t need another place to store documents for its own sake; they need systems that reflect how projects actually operate, allowing supplier information to move with the commercial, operational, and financial processes that depend on it. When those links are maintained, producing evidence for a client, auditor, or internal team becomes part of how the project is managed rather than an exercise in reconstructing what happened afterwards.
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