The trades industry is one of the most heavily regulated sectors in Australia. Aside from contractual agreements, trades businesses must consider things like insurance, building codes, equipment checks, health and safety standards, and much more. There’s also a lot of paperwork that goes into every job, making compliance a major headache for business owners.
With the right tools, however, businesses don’t have to worry about the slow, tedious, and manual-intensive processes involved in compliance management. Instead, they can use an automated compliance platform to run efficiently, and here’s how:
Simplified process management
The best compliance automation platforms take the guesswork out of meeting industry and government regulations.
For starters, it lets you set mandatory role requirements. The automation platform checks your staff’s certificates and licences, and only assigns them to the jobs they’re qualified for. If an electrician doesn’t have an Australian Qualification Certificate III, for example, they’re only permitted to do routine work by themselves. Setting these role requirements means you’ll never have to waste time checking your tradies’ qualifications before sending them to work. Plus, you can quickly identify underqualified workers and provide them with the training they need to work more complex jobs.
What’s more, compliance automation platforms can be mapped directly to Australia’s Work Health and Safety policies and other pertinent regulations. You can program automated workflows that send tradies compliance forms relevant to the job. Automation software can then prepopulate form information into risk assessment reports to help managers evaluate and mitigate liabilities. Automation can even prevent employees from proceeding with a project unless all industry requirements are met.
Streamlined regulation tracking
Rather than spending hours tracking policy and regulation changes, automated compliance platforms can do it for you. It can monitor state and nationwide laws regarding trades work and notify managers about new legal obligations in real-time. Also, you can configure automated procedures so that your company is always in line with legislative changes.
Error-free procedures
Compliance teams must accurately verify all the documents and components associated with different compliance requirements. However, people make mistakes, especially when it comes to something as complex as compliance management. Staff may input the wrong data for reports and audits, while tradies may accidentally overlook certain health and safety codes. Such mistakes can have a domino effect where crucial errors pile up, putting your company at risk of non-compliance penalties and costly lawsuits.
First-rate automated compliance platforms address these issues by letting you create workflows with limited human involvement. It can be programmed to send simple to-do lists to workers responsible for site inspections, workplace incidents, and licences. This way, everyone in the company knows how best to handle any situation and are always following correct protocols.
More importantly, compliance platforms eliminate repetitive and error-prone manual data entry tasks. Inspections, invoices, and other compliance forms can be captured through a mobile app and directly processed into your company’s database for fast and easy approvals. This ensures data is always reliable while saving your staff from tedious, menial work.
Paperless compliance
Documentation is key to ensuring compliance, so trades businesses must have a fluid record-keeping system in place. This means that updated versions of documents must be stored in a secure location that can be accessed by authorised staff.
Most trade businesses, however, still rely on archaic paper filing systems and data collection, which is not ideal from an efficiency standpoint. Paper records can take hours to retrieve and there’s always a possibility they can get lost or misfiled.
By contrast, automated compliance platforms like WorkBuddy are cloud-based. Digital copies of documents are maintained in a centralised database that makes it easy for staff to track and collate compliance-related documents. Different versions of documents are also automatically backed up and tagged to streamline auditing. So if a compliance issue occurs, like inconsistencies in site inspection forms, compliance managers can instantly get the answers they need.
Enhanced data analytics
Finally, automation can aggregate massive pools of data into a single dashboard where you can monitor everything about compliance practices. You have visibility over how licences are verified, how transactions are approved, and how reports and forms are submitted. This also means you’ll be able to identify ineffective compliance controls and formulate strategies to correct them. The end result is a more efficient compliance process that allows you to focus on more important tasks like serving your clients.
When it comes to running a trades business, the right automated compliance platform can make a world of difference. WorkBuddy is a job management system with built-in automated compliance features. It streamlines compliance workflows, distributes instructions and forms to the right people, and lets you oversee business practices from a centralised dashboard. Book a demo today to see our compliance automation features in action.
