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Subbie certificates are saved straight from email to Drive, logged in a register, and monitored daily. Expiry coming up in 30, 14 or 7 days? You get an alert before it becomes a compliance problem — not after.

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Client type: Builder managing subcontractor compliance — Certificates of Currency and QBCC licences

The problem

Subbie insurance certificates arrive by email, get saved (maybe) to a random folder, and their expiry dates live in someone's memory or a spreadsheet nobody checks. An expired Certificate of Currency or QBCC licence discovered mid-claim or mid-audit is a genuine liability — and "the subbie said they renewed it" is not a compliance system.

What I built

A four-workflow compliance system in n8n:

1 — Ingest (watches the inbox)

  1. A Gmail trigger polls the compliance inbox every 5 minutes for certificate emails
  2. Each attachment is filed to a Drive holding area, then AI extracts the key fields — subcontractor, document type, policy details, expiry date — with separate handling for PDFs and scanned images
  3. Deterministic code validates and normalises everything the AI extracts: proper date parsing, fuzzy matching against the known subcontractor list, and supersede-and-archive handling so renewed certificates replace old ones cleanly
  4. Files land in per-subcontractor Drive folders (created automatically if missing) with version-safe naming
  5. The verification rule: every AI-extracted row enters the register as "Pending Verification" — always, non-negotiably. A wrong expiry date on a compliance register is a real liability, so a human confirms before it's trusted. The admin gets a verification request email with each new document.

2 — Expiry Sweeper (daily)

Runs at 7am Brisbane time, works out which certificates expire in 30, 14 or 7 days, and sends tiered email alerts — plus SMS for the urgent tiers. Every alert is stamped so nothing gets sent twice.

3 — Register Health Report (weekly)

Every Monday at 7am, cross-references what each subcontractor is required to hold against what's actually on file, and emails a health report showing the gaps before they become problems.

4 — Error Handler

Any failure across the system triggers a formatted alert email — no silent breakdowns in a compliance system.

Tools used

n8n · Gmail · Google Drive · Google Sheets · OpenAI · SMS provider