Managing CSCS checks and site inductions across multiple sites

One site is manageable on paper. A portfolio of live sites, each with a rotating mix of subcontractor companies, is where induction and CSCS tracking quietly breaks down. The principal contractor still carries the same duties on every site, but the volume and the churn make a clipboard-and-spreadsheet approach unreliable exactly when it matters most.

The problem with checking cards at the gate

Checking a CSCS card by eye works for a handful of people you know. Across several sites and dozens of workers from different companies, it stops working. Cards get glanced at and waved through. An expiry date that is six weeks away today is forgotten by the time it lapses. And unless someone writes it down, there is no record that the check ever happened — so when the question comes later, you cannot show it did.

The same is true of every other credential a worker might need. Without a system that captures the card at sign-in, reviews it, and warns you before it expires, an out-of-date qualification is something you discover during an investigation rather than before the worker reaches the gate.

Inductions have to happen before work starts

Under CDM 2015, the principal contractor is responsible for making sure every worker has a site-specific induction before they start. On a single site, a toolbox-style induction and a signed sheet can cover it. Across a portfolio, paper inductions have two failure modes: they are not enforced, so a worker can end up on site without one, and they are poorly evidenced, so even when the induction did happen you cannot easily prove it.

What you actually need is a hard gate — an induction that has to be completed before a worker can be checked in, recorded automatically against the person and the site, on every site, every day.

Why multiple companies make it harder

A portfolio almost always means multiple subcontractor companies on the same sites. Each one manages its own workforce, its own cards, and its own paperwork. You need oversight across all of them without taking on their admin, and you need each company's data kept separate so that one subcontractor never sees another's records.

Doing that with shared spreadsheets is where things go wrong. Either you become the bottleneck, manually chasing every company's cards and inductions, or you lose visibility and trust that each company is keeping its own house in order. Neither is a position you want to be in when an auditor asks for the evidence.

What good looks like across a portfolio

A system that scales across multiple sites and companies should give you:

• Induction gating — the digital induction blocks check-in until it is complete, recorded automatically with a timestamp.
• CSCS capture and expiry alerts — credentials captured at sign-in, reviewed, and flagged at 90, 30 and 7 days before they expire, so nothing lapses unnoticed.
• Live people-on-site, per site — a current view for fire roll-call plus a full attendance history you can hand over.
• Contractor self-service with data isolation — each subcontractor company onboards and manages its own workers behind the site's entrance QR, and sees only its own data, while you see everything across the site from one dashboard.
• One audit pack per site, on demand — attendance, induction and credential evidence exported whenever it is asked for.

The audit test

A simple way to judge any approach is to ask the question an auditor will ask: on this date, on this site, who was on site, were they inducted, and were they carded? If the honest answer is "we would have to go back through the paperwork and piece it together," the system is not working. If you can export it in a couple of clicks because it was captured as it happened, it is.

That difference — between reconstructing evidence after the fact and producing evidence that was captured automatically — is the whole point of moving off paper once you are running more than one site.

How The Site Book handles it

Site Control is built for exactly this: a principal contractor running one or more active sites with multiple subcontractor companies. Each company self-joins behind the site's permanent entrance QR and onboards its own workers; the digital induction gates check-in; CSCS and other credentials are captured, reviewed and flagged before they expire; and live people-on-site plus attendance history roll up to a single compliance view, with test-verified data isolation between companies. When you need to prove it, the audit-grade exports are there on demand — and the full CDM pack, from RAMS to the Construction Phase Plan, is generated in the same tool. It is priced per active site with unlimited workers, from £675 per site per month.