Uploading a document takes two minutes.
Everything that has to happen after that takes the rest of the year.

Nikolai Wullaert

The Contractor Strategist · Onyx One, part of Veriforce

Dear reader,

Companies like to compare contractor management solutions on three things: how user-friendly the platform feels, how fast a contractor can register, and how many steps that takes. Understandable. That is the part you can show in a demo.

It is also incomplete.

Fast registration and low workload are two different promises. Most software delivers only the first.

A contractor who registers in two minutes feels like a solved problem. The form is filled in, the document is uploaded, the checkmark turns green. Everyone goes back to work.

Except the work has just begun. Someone still has to read that document. Check that it matches the person standing at the gate. Check that it is still valid. And if it does not match, someone has to contact the contractor, ask for a correction, and wait again.

That second phase is invisible to anyone looking only at the registration form. It is not invisible to whoever handles it every day.

To pinpoint where the burden sits, it helps to break contractor administration into five layers.

Layer one is collecting data: company details, personal details, documents, certificates, training records. Layer two is interpreting that information: is the document correct, relevant, valid, applicable. Layer three is correcting errors and missing information: informing contractors, requesting new documents, resolving exceptions. Layer four is maintaining compliance: tracking expiry dates, sending reminders, processing changes, adding new employees and subcontractors. Layer five is translating compliance into an operational decision: can this person actually work or enter today.

Some players in the market build their entire promise around layer one: a company profile that auto-populates from public sources such as the Belgian company registry (KBO) or VIES. Impressive to watch, and it solves a real problem.

It is and remains layer one. The question is what happens with the four layers after that.

Layer two is where generic software falls short, because interpreting requires knowledge that an upload field does not have.

Take the A1 document. The European Commission recorded 3.6 million A1 certificates issued in 2021, spread across 28 jurisdictions, each with its own language, its own format, and its own competent authority. Even the Commission itself could not get a full breakdown for part of these documents: several member states could not provide complete data on sector, people involved, or duration.

If the authority collecting these documents already struggles with gaps, it is no surprise that an HR employee placing a Romanian or Portuguese A1 document next to a Belgian work permit has doubts.

Layer three eats up the most hours and shows up the least in a report, because it consists entirely of back and forth.

A missing document means an email. A wrong document means a phone call. A contractor who replies in another language means an extra translation. A subcontractor who was not registered means the whole process starts over, one layer deeper.

None of this shows up at the moment of registration. It shows up the week after, and the week after that, each time as a small contact moment that looks harmless on its own and together makes up a significant part of someone’s work week.

Layer four surprises organizations the most, because they treat onboarding as a project with an end date. Compliance has no end date.

A certificate expires. A safety training needs renewal. A contractor adds a new employee, or a new subcontractor, and that person starts back at layer one. Anyone who does not track this continuously discovers the expiry date when it is already too late: at the gate, or worse, during an incident.

This is not a criticism of organizations that miss this. Continuously monitoring hundreds of files at once is exactly the kind of work people are bad at and systems should be good at, if they are built for it.

Layer five is where most organizations are least organized, and where the risk is greatest: translating “this contractor is compliant according to our system” into “this person may actually enter that zone today.”

That is no longer a document question. It is an access question, in real time, per person, per zone, per moment. This is where physical identity and access management and applications such as Smart Access come in: not as an extra feature, but as the place where the first four layers prove their worth or do not.

A badge that opens proves the technology works. It does not prove the access was justified.

Most organizations ask themselves the wrong question when choosing a solution: how fast can someone register?

The question that answers the real burden is different: how much work is left for our organization once registration is complete?

That second answer determines how many people you need, how many errors creep into the process, and how well you can prove an access decision was justified. The first answer determines how good the demo looks.

The best contractor management solution is not necessarily the one that asks the least of your system. It is the one that ultimately asks the least of your organization.

That distinction sounds subtle, but it determines where you stand in five years. A system that solves layer one perfectly gives you a smooth start and a growing pile of work in the layers after it. A system that supports all five layers gives you a less spectacular demo and an organization that does not need more people every quarter to process the same volume of files.

There is no press release for a file that tracks itself. There is a difference in how many people you need for it.

Nikolai Wullaert

The Contractor Strategist · Onyx One, part of Veriforce

Contractor Strategists

Sources

1. European Commission, DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, Posting of workers: Report on A1 Portable Documents issued in 2021 (October 2022)
2. Claeys & Engels, Binding value of A1 certificates and fraud (CJEU C-410/21 and C-661/21)
3. NSSO (Belgian National Social Security Office), Article 30bis withholding obligation (official explanation)