How Sidecar Works

Sidecar helps contractor administration teams keep customer-required work from disappearing across spreadsheets, email, shared folders, calendars, and customer portals.

It gives your team one operational view of what is missing, what needs attention, what has already been requested, and who is responsible for the next step.

Sidecar does not replace your customer portals or document storage systems. It organizes the work around them.

What Sidecar helps you manage

Contractor administration rarely happens in one system.

A certificate may be stored in a shared folder. Its expiration date may be recorded in a spreadsheet. The latest request may be buried in Outlook. A customer portal may show that something was submitted without explaining what your team needs to do next.

Sidecar brings that operational context together.

You can use Sidecar to track:

• Customers and customer-specific requested items
• Documents and expiration dates
• Requests and follow-ups
• Work waiting on customers, brokers, employees, platforms, or internal teams
• Internal tasks and ownership
• Customer and platform contacts
• Inbound replies and attachments
• Activity history
• Operational reports and exports

The goal is not to create another place where your team must maintain disconnected information. The goal is to make the work already happening easier to see, understand, and continue.

The questions Sidecar answers

Sidecar is organized around a few practical questions.

What am I missing?

Sidecar identifies missing requested items, documents needing attention, upcoming expirations, overdue work, and unresolved tasks.

Who has the ball?

The Waiting On workflow shows whether the next step belongs to a customer, broker, employee, customer platform, internal team, or another party.

What should I work on now?

The Today page brings the most important customer work to the front instead of making you inspect every spreadsheet row and email thread each morning.

What has already happened?

Activity History records important workflow events so your team can understand when something was requested, received, changed, completed, or reviewed.

How Sidecar is organized

Today

Today is the main starting point for daily work.

It highlights customers that appear to need attention and explains the operational reasons behind that attention. This may include a missing required item, an expired document, a follow-up that is due, or an overdue internal task.

Today is a prioritization view. It does not determine whether a customer, contractor, or document is compliant or approved.

Customers

Each Customer Detail page brings together the operational story for one customer.

Depending on the customer, this may include:

• Requested items
• Documents
• Expirations
• Contacts
• Customer platforms
• Internal tasks
• Waiting work
• Request and reply history
• Activity History
• Package status
• Operational Focus

Today helps you find the work. Customer Detail helps you understand it.

Documents

Documents can be tracked by customer, platform, category, status, expiration date, and subject or tracked party.

Sidecar can also assist with document intake by suggesting information found through OCR. Suggestions remain reviewable, and Sidecar does not automatically approve documents or make compliance determinations.

Some documents, such as W-9s, may not have an expiration date. Sidecar supports non-expiring records without requiring a fictional date merely to keep a database column emotionally fulfilled.

Requested items

Requested items represent customer-required work that your team is tracking.

An item may be missing, in progress, submitted, ready, accepted, waiting, or not applicable, depending on the workflow and the information your team has recorded.

Requested items help separate the obligation itself from any document, email, or task associated with fulfilling it.

Waiting On

Waiting On shows work that cannot move forward until someone else responds or takes action.

Each waiting item can include:

• The party responsible for the next step
• A waiting note
• The date waiting began
• A follow-up date
• Related customer and workflow context

Waiting does not mean the work is complete. It means the next move currently belongs somewhere else.

Tasks

Tasks represent internal work.

They can be assigned to workspace users and tracked by status, priority, due date, and customer. Tasks remain separate from external requested items so your team can distinguish between something a customer owes you and something your own team needs to do.

All Work

All Work provides a broader view of unresolved activity across the workspace.

It can help your team review missing items, document attention, due-soon work, open tasks, and waiting obligations without opening each customer individually.

Activity History

Activity History provides operational context for changes and actions.

It helps answer questions such as:

• Was a request already sent?
• When did this item enter a waiting state?
• Was a document updated?
• When was a task completed?
• Why does the current status differ from what someone remembers?

Activity History supports the current workflow state. It does not silently override it.

Requests, replies, and follow-ups

Sidecar can help prepare and send document requests using customer or workflow contacts.

Before sending, users can review the recipient, subject, message, waiting party, and follow-up date. After a successful send, Sidecar records the request and updates the associated workflow state.

Replies sent to the unique Sidecar reply address can enter the inbound review queue. A user can then review the message, attachments, and suggested relationship before changing customer workflow records.

Sidecar keeps a human in the review process. An inbound email does not automatically rewrite the state of the workspace merely because an attachment arrived wearing a convincing filename.

Importing existing data

Sidecar supports spreadsheet import so teams do not have to begin by manually recreating every customer, document, task, and requested item.

The import process is reviewable. Sidecar analyzes the workbook, identifies information it understands, and shows what it intends to create or update before applying changes.

Information that does not map to a native Sidecar field can be preserved as imported metadata rather than discarded.

Sidecar also provides exports so your organization can retain access to its operational data.

What Sidecar does not do

Sidecar is an operational workflow tool. It does not:

• Determine legal or regulatory compliance
• Approve contractors, vendors, documents, or insurance coverage
• Interpret insurance limits, endorsements, or policy wording
• Guarantee acceptance by a customer or portal
• Replace Avetta, ISNetworld, Veriforce, or other required customer platforms
• Replace your document storage or accounting system
• Automatically make workflow decisions without review

Sidecar helps your team surface tracked gaps, coordinate the next step, and preserve the operational history supporting those decisions.

Using this documentation

Read Core Concepts for the relationships that are easiest to misunderstand, including requested items versus documents, contacts versus tracked parties, waiting work, package status, attention priority, and Activity History.

Then use Getting Started for a walkthrough of the first workspace setup and the normal daily workflow.

If you only need part of Sidecar at first, browse Common Setup Patterns. The patterns cover simple expiration tracking, customer document package checklists, request and follow-up tracking, and employee or subcontractor document ownership. Each pattern explains which features matter now and which ones can remain unused.

Continue with Importing Data when you are bringing an existing tracker into Sidecar, then use Daily Workflow for the normal Today-to-Customer-Detail work cycle. Additional guides cover requests, inbound replies, Waiting On, documents, tasks, reporting, exports, and workspace administration.

Sidecar is designed to answer a complicated operational question with a relatively simple one:

What am I missing?