How small Principal Contractors run a tighter business

Every Principal Contractor business runs on the same handful of things underneath the actual building work: knowing who's on your sites and whether they're allowed to be, getting paid on time, keeping enough of a paper trail that a dispute doesn't turn into a scramble. At a two- or three-person Principal Contractor, those things get squeezed in around everything else. Below are five specific changes, not five things to think about, and each one is something you could start today.

1. Build a one-page subbie checklist, before the next one starts
2. Write the response-due date on every claim the day it lands
3. Keep a shortlist of two or three subbies per trade
4. Check one number every Friday: claimed, approved, paid
5. Pick one repeated task and hand it off this week

1Build a one-page subbie checklist, right now, before the next one starts

Don't wait for the next new subcontractor to figure out what you need from them. Write the list once, today:

• White Card
• Relevant trade licence (photographed, not just quoted)
• Certificate of currency for public liability insurance
• A signed SWMS for the work they're actually doing, not a generic one
• Who in your office confirms all four before they're allowed on site, and how

Put it somewhere every subbie gets sent it the same way, an email template, a shared doc, whatever's least friction for you. The goal isn't a fancy system, it's that "what do you need from me" gets answered the same way every time instead of reconstructed from memory.

2Write the response-due date on every claim the day it lands

Look up your state's actual statutory response window today, if you don't already have it memorised, it's typically a specific number of business days from receipt, not from when you get around to reading it. Then build one habit: the moment a payment claim or variation request lands, write the due date on it before doing anything else. On the invoice itself, in the subject line, wherever you'll actually see it. Not because you'll forget the claim exists, but because the clock started on the day it arrived, not the day you had time to look at it, and that gap is where late responses actually come from.

3Keep a shortlist of two or three subbies per trade, and actually write down how each job went

After your next few jobs, spend two minutes writing one line per subbie: would you use them again, and why or why not. That's the whole system. The next time you need a plumber, you're picking from a known list instead of sourcing cold and re-vetting someone from scratch, and the vetting you already did stays useful instead of evaporating the moment the job ends.

4Check one number every Friday: claimed, approved, paid, per project

Not your bank balance, not the quarterly BAS summary, three numbers, per project, once a week:

Claimed, what's been invoiced. Approved, what's been accepted. Paid, what's actually landed.

It takes five minutes if you already know where to look, and it's the single fastest way to catch a stalled claim or an unapproved variation before it's a cash flow problem instead of a Friday-afternoon phone call.

5Pick the one task you did three times last week that didn't need your judgment, and hand it off

Not "delegate more", pick one specific, recurring thing. Chasing a document. Re-explaining the onboarding checklist you just wrote. Manually checking an expiry date. If it's pure repetition and doesn't require a decision only you can make, it's the first thing to hand to whoever's next in the office, or to a system, this week, not someday.

---

None of this needs new software to start, a shared checklist and a Friday reminder cover the first four. For what it's worth, this is the shape Novato is built to carry once it stops fitting on a spreadsheet: subbie documents that follow them instead of resetting per job, a claim's due date tracked automatically instead of written on an invoice, one place a variation actually lives.