Attendance plus compliance
Contractors create a different problem from employees. You are responsible for what happens on your premises, but you do not control their training, their insurance or their equipment. The pre-start checks are how that gap gets closed, and the reason they belong on the same sheet as the attendance record is that separating them is how they get skipped.
Pre-start checks and the sign-in table
The header captures the site, date, work order number, a description of works and the responsible manager.
Then the compliance block, which is the point of this template. Six checks: public liability insurance sighted and current, workers compensation confirmed, licences and trade qualifications sighted, safe work method statement received, site induction completed by all attending, and permits issued where required. Underneath, fields for the insurance expiry date, the permit numbers issued and who did the checking.
The attendance table then captures name, company, trade or licence number, time in, time out and signature. The responsible manager signs at the bottom confirming both that the checks were completed before work commenced and that the attendance record is accurate.
Sighted means sighted
The compliance block only means something if each tick corresponds to a document someone actually looked at. Insurance in particular is worth being strict about, because a certificate of currency that expired two months ago looks identical to a current one at a glance, which is why the expiry date has its own field rather than being folded into a tick.
Attach the supporting documents to the sheet, or record where they are filed. A tick with nothing behind it is a record that you believed something, not a record that you checked it.
Why this sheet matters after an incident
If something goes wrong involving a contractor, three questions get asked immediately. Who was present. What were they licensed and insured to do. And were the pre-start checks completed before work started.
A sheet like this answers all three from one page, with a dated signature against the answer. Attendance records and compliance files kept separately answer the same questions eventually, but reconstructing which checks were done before which day of work, months later, from two different systems, is a considerably worse position to be in.