Have a current clearance and COI in hand every time somebody asks

The request always arrives the same way. You are due on site Monday, and on Friday afternoon somebody in an office emails asking for a current clearance certificate and a certificate of insurance. Not the ones you sent in March. Current ones.

If you have them, it is a two minute job. If one of them lapsed three weeks ago and nobody noticed, you are not starting Monday.

Why it gates everything

"RE: #6, you will never get quality commercial work without WSIB. You'll need it to even step foot on some properties."

an HVAC contractor on r/ProHVACR

"Being business noobs I had no idea WSIB was mandatory and even if it wasn't all builders ask for it."

a plumbing business owner on r/SmallBusinessCanada

That second sentence is the operative one. Whether you are legally required to register is a question with a genuinely contested answer in these threads, and even the people who think they are exempt end up registering because every builder asks anyway.

Worth knowing that the disagreement is real:

"If you're doing service work and getting paid by the home owner you don't need WSIB. You need it legally as soon as you step on a job site."

a contractor on r/SmallBusinessCanada

Get your own answer from WSIB rather than from a forum or from this page. What is not in dispute is that the certificate is a gate, and a lapsed gate costs you the week.

Put every date in one place

Everything somebody might ask you for, sorted by what runs out first. The clearance at eleven days is the one that stops you getting on site.

Clearance, liability policy, trade licence, tickets. Sorted so the next thing to run out is at the top, with the reference number beside it, because that is the other thing you get asked for.

The warning window is yours to set per row, and they should not all be the same. A clearance you can renew online in a morning needs less runway than a licence with an inspection attached. Sixty days is a reasonable default; thirty is not enough for anything that involves another organisation.

Mark the ones clients should see. Those appear in your project portal, so a GC's coordinator can look rather than email you. The ones you would rather not publish stay private.

The renewal habit

Renew on the warning, not on the expiry. The point of an eleven day warning is to act at eleven days. Renewals get refused, get queued, get asked for extra documents. Treating the warning as the deadline is what keeps you working.

Ask your broker for the certificate as a file, not a promise. A certificate of insurance is a document, and the person asking wants the document. Get it emailed the day the policy renews and put it against the row.

Reference numbers live with the record. WSIB account, policy number, licence number. When somebody asks for proof, half of what they want is the number.

Check it before the job, not after the request. Opening this panel takes five seconds and saves the Friday afternoon.

The renewal is a phone call; remembering it is the hard part

Getting a clearance takes minutes. Renewing a policy is one call to your broker. Neither of those is what costs contractors work.

What costs them work is the Friday a site coordinator asks for a certificate that expired eleven days ago, and the job stops while somebody sorts it out. The dates, the numbers, the warning before it runs out, and the certificate your client can check for themselves: that is the part that keeps you on site.

What WSIB is and how it works for a contractor is the WSIB guide.

What it costs

Commercial terms depend on the workflow. Review the relevant AEC Stack product page before you start.

Open your dashboard and put in the expiry on the clearance sitting in your inbox. That is the one somebody will ask for next.