Plan your setup
Gather the information you already have and understand the records Sidecar uses to describe the work.
Before you begin
It helps to have a few things nearby before you start:
- Your current customer or client list
- The spreadsheet you use to track documents, expirations, requests, or follow-ups
- A few representative customer requirements
- The names and email addresses of customer, broker, platform, employee, or internal contacts
- The documents you want to track first
Do not wait until every spreadsheet has been cleaned up. Sidecar is meant to help organize the real workflow, not require a ceremonial purification of Excel before you are allowed through the door.
A good first goal is to set up three to five active customers. Choose a mix: one that is mostly in good shape, one with missing work, and one with a request or follow-up already in progress. That is enough to make Today, Waiting On, and Customer Detail useful without turning setup into a week-long data-entry project.
Understand what belongs in Sidecar
Sidecar tracks the operational work around customer-required documents. The main record types are related, but they serve different purposes. This section covers the practical setup decisions; Core Concepts explains how those records behave together once work is underway.
Customers
A customer is the organization asking your company for documents, information, or administrative work. A general contractor, utility, facility owner, municipality, or other client can each be a customer in Sidecar.
The customer page becomes the central place for that relationship. It brings together requested items, documents, tasks, contacts, platform assignments, waiting work, and activity history.
Requested items
A requested item is something the customer expects your team to provide or complete.
Examples include:
- Provide a current certificate of insurance
- Submit a signed W-9
- Upload an employee training roster
- Complete a safety questionnaire
- Revise an endorsement and resubmit it through the customer portal
The requested item represents the obligation. It can exist before the supporting document is available.
Documents
A document is the file or tracked record that may satisfy a requested item.
For example, “Provide a current COI” is the requested item. The actual Certificate of Insurance record is the document. Keeping those concepts separate helps Sidecar show the difference between what the customer asked for and what your team currently has on file.
Documents can include a category, status, effective date, expiration date, customer or platform relationship, and the person or organization the document belongs to.
Not every document expires. W-9s and some other records can be tracked without inventing a fake expiration date.
Tasks
Tasks are internal work your team needs to perform.
A task might be “Confirm payroll export is ready,” “Upload revised COI to Avetta,” or “Call the field supervisor about missing training dates.” Tasks can have an owner, priority, status, due date, notes, and related customer or document.
A task is different from a requested item. Requested items describe what the customer needs. Tasks describe what your own team needs to do.
Waiting work
Waiting means the next step currently belongs to someone else.
Sidecar can track work waiting on a customer, broker, platform, employee, internal team, or another party. A waiting item can include a note, the date waiting began, and the date your team plans to follow up.
Waiting is not the same as complete. It simply answers a practical question: who has the ball right now?