TradeClear

Know which trades on your site are cleared, insured and safe to pay, without chasing anybody for paperwork.

In private beta with Ontario general contractors

Under section 141 of the Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Act, hiring a contractor without a valid WSIB clearance can leave you liable for their premiums, and exposed to penalties reaching $100,000. Clearances last ninety days. Most of them expire on the same four dates every year.

Which means four times a year, somebody in your office pulls up the WSIB portal, types in twenty account numbers one at a time, and saves the results into a folder that nobody can find eighteen months later when an auditor asks. In between, insurance certificates quietly expire and nobody notices until there is an incident.

TradeClear does that job every night instead. It checks each subcontractor's standing directly with WSIB, keeps the page the province served as proof, reads the expiry date off the certificate of insurance they sent you, and tells you the day something lapses.

How it works

You invite a trade by phone number

Business name, trade, and the mobile number of whoever actually has the paperwork. They get one text.

They tap the link and are done in a minute

No password, no account, no app. The page asks for their WSIB account number and a photo of their certificate of insurance, and confirms that nothing further is needed. That last part matters more than it sounds: it is what stops the call to your superintendent asking whether it went through.

TradeClear checks, and keeps checking

The WSIB portal is queried directly and the response is stored as it arrived. A vision model reads the insurer, policy number, liability limit and expiry date off the certificate, and every one of those is then re-checked by rules rather than taken on trust. Anything that looks wrong is flagged for a person instead of being quietly accepted.

Every night at two in the morning

Clearances due to lapse are re-verified, subcontractors with something expiring get a text with the same link, and your accounts payable desk gets one email listing the trades it recommends holding. On a night when nothing is wrong, nothing is sent.

What it looks like

The TradeClear roster, showing eight trade contractors with WSIB clearance dates, insurance expiry dates and status badges The subcontractor upload page on a phone, asking for a WSIB account number and a photo of the certificate of insurance One trade contractor, showing every WSIB clearance check ever run with a link to the stored proof The activity log, listing checks, texts and document uploads in order

The audit pack

One button produces a ZIP with a folder for every trade contractor: the timestamped HTML page WSIB served on each check, the certificates of insurance they supplied, and a plain summary of what was read off each one. The clearance records are append-only, so nothing in that pack can be edited after the fact, which is the whole reason it is worth showing to anybody.

If a trade is on your roster with evidence missing, the pack says so by name rather than leaving them out.

Pricing

Starter

$99

per month, CAD

  • Up to 15 subcontractors
  • Quarterly WSIB checks with stored proof
  • Insurance expiry tracking
  • Audit pack export

Growth

$199

per month, CAD

  • Up to 50 subcontractors
  • Everything in Starter
  • Automated text reminders
  • Nightly summary to accounts payable

Enterprise

$399

per month, CAD

  • Unlimited subcontractors
  • Everything in Growth
  • Multi-project permissioning
  • Custom accounting exports

Ontario customers are charged 13% HST on top. Cancel from the billing portal at any time.

Common questions

Does this replace pulling a clearance certificate myself?

It automates the same lookup and keeps the result. The certificate WSIB issues is still WSIB's document, and TradeClear stores the page verbatim rather than reprinting it. If you need a formal certificate for a particular contract, get it from WSIB directly.

What happens if the WSIB portal is down?

Nothing changes. An unreachable portal tells you nothing about a contractor, so the previous result stands and the row says when it was last confirmed. Turning somebody else's outage into a red badge would send a crew home over nothing, which is the one mistake this software cannot afford to make.

Do my subcontractors need an account?

No. They get a link, they use it, and that is the entire relationship. The link works for their business only, and you can reissue it if it goes to the wrong number.

Can it stop a payment?

No, and it is built not to. When a trade lapses, TradeClear raises a recommendation for your accounts payable desk. The decision to hold a progress payment is yours, under your contract, and no software should be making it on your behalf.

What if the photo of the certificate is unreadable?

The document is stored either way and the row says a person needs to look at it. A certificate that cannot be read automatically is still a certificate you have on file.

Where is my data?

In a Cloudflare database and object store, on Cloudflare's network. The documents are private and are only ever served to a signed-in session on your own deployment.

Getting in touch

hello@antipodetech.com
TradeClear is in private beta with Ontario general contractors. Email me with the size of your trade list and I will get you set up.

TradeClear is an administrative tracking and record-keeping service. It does not provide legal advice, statutory safety audits, or insurance underwriting, and it does not hold, stop or alter any payment. Verification results are read from the WSIB clearance portal and from documents your trade contractors supply. Check the source before you rely on one. Nothing here is a substitute for advice from your own lawyer or broker.