Track the carriers you hire

What this is for

You hire other carriers to cover work you cannot reach yourself. This keeps their insurance, carrier profile, and WCB paperwork on file, tells you before anything lapses, and gives each carrier a page where they can send you what is missing.

Be clear about what it is not. Alberta Transportation does not require you to hold documents on a carrier you hire. Its requirements run to whoever holds the Safety Fitness Certificate, and an independent carrier holds their own. This is your due diligence file, and the reasons to keep it are your insurer, your customer contracts, WCB liability for an uncovered subcontractor, and your position if a hired carrier has a bad crash. Do not tell a carrier the government requires this, because it does not, and they may well know that.

Turn it on

Setup in the admin panel, find Subcontractors, click On. A Subcontractors entry appears in the side navigation. Only a Super Admin can switch modules on and off; if nothing happens when you click, read the message at the top of the Setup page.

Set your bar first

Click Set your coverage limits and warning windows from the Subcontractors page. The list of documents is fixed, but the bar is yours:

• Minimum limit on fleet, general liability, and cargo insurance. Set these to whatever your contracts call for. A certificate that comes in underneath is flagged the moment it is filed instead of during a claim.
• Warn this many days ahead, per document. Thirty is the default.
• Refresh every (months) for the carrier profile and the WCB rate statement. Those two carry no expiry of their own, so they fall due on an interval instead. Six and twelve months are the defaults.
• Collect this switches a document off entirely, for a carrier type that has no use for it. Missing it makes the carrier non-compliant keeps collecting a document without letting a gap fail them.

Do this before you add carriers, so the first certificate you file is measured against the right bar.

Add a carrier and file what you already have

Add the carrier with their legal name and a contact. Then file whatever is already sitting in your inbox: open a document, choose the file, and enter the dates and limits off the certificate. Anything you file yourself is accepted straight away, because you are the one accepting it.

Fill in the insurance broker while you are there. Renewal certificates come from the broker, not the carrier, so when a renewal goes quiet that contact is the fastest way to the document.

Invite the carrier

On the carrier's page, under Portal access, enter a name and email and click Send sign-in link. They get an email with a link and no password to create. Sending again to the same address just issues a fresh link, so that is also your resend button.

They can only ever see their own company. They cannot see your other carriers, your workers, or anything else in your account.

What the carrier does

They open the link and see a short checklist: what you need, what you already have, what is expiring, and the coverage limits you require. They upload each document with its dates and limits, and they can correct their own contact and broker details.

What they cannot do is mark their own paperwork accepted. Everything they send arrives as Awaiting review and stays that way until you look at it.

Review what they send

Anything waiting appears in a Waiting on you panel at the top of the carrier's page. Open the file, then either:

• Accept. It becomes the document on file and replaces the one it supersedes. When you accept a carrier profile you also record the safety rating and monitoring status you read off it, because that is the part anyone actually makes a decision on.
• Send back, with a reason. The reason is required, and it shows on the carrier's page so they know what to fix. Sending something back without saying why just means they send the same thing again.

Reading the statuses

| What you see | What it means | | --- | --- | | On file | Accepted, in date, and meets your limit | | Due soon | Inside your warning window | | Overdue | Past its date. The carrier is non-compliant | | Under your limit | Accepted and in date, but the coverage is below your minimum | | Awaiting review | The carrier sent it and nobody has checked it yet | | Not on file | Never received |

The carrier list is sorted worst first, because the point of the screen is what needs chasing. Coming due above it shows everything falling due across all your carriers, nearest first, which is the Monday morning list.

Warnings

Once a due date enters your warning window, the admins on your account get a notice, a sharper one inside the last week, and a lapsed notice once it is past. You are told once per stage, not once per day. Widening a warning window applies to what you are already holding, not just to the next thing filed.

Export the file

Export their file on a carrier's page prints their whole record: who they are, what is outstanding, every requirement with its dates and limits, and the history of what you held and when you checked it. Print it or save it as a PDF. The history is the part that matters after an incident, when the question is what you had on file on a given date.