Frequently asked questions

No. Taking part in a job you have been invited to is free, whether you are the client, a subcontractor or anyone else on the team, and joining never asks for a card.

Yes, a free one, under the email address you were invited at. That is how the job knows it is you. Open the link in your invitation and accept it: that goes for a client as much as a subcontractor or a team member. Only if your invitation had no link to accept is signing in with that address enough, and then the job is on your dashboard.

Whatever the business running the job has given your seat, which it can change later. What a client sees and what a subcontractor sees set out where a seat starts.

A subcontractor's invitation comes from The Contractor Hub, so check your spam folder, then ask the builder to press Invite on the job's team card again. A client's invitation comes from The Contractor Hub in the builder's name, or from the builder's own email if they sent it that way: check your spam folder, then ask the builder to send it again. If neither works, write to us.

On the pricing page, and only there. It is the one place TCH states a price, so this page points to it rather than repeating one.

Yes. Every business that starts by Sunday 22 November gets Live Interface free for 30 days, with no credit card, from the first time it signs in. When the month is up the account goes back to free, nothing is charged by itself, and nothing you entered is deleted.

Paid plans are not on sale yet. When they are, the pricing page is where they open.

An iPhone app is in testing now. Download links go up on this site when the App Store listing is live. Until then, everything works in the browser on your phone.

Yes: the same sign-in, two-factor included, and the same jobs.

TCH is a register of New Zealand trades, contractors and trade services. Customers find and compare professionals; businesses list a profile, respond to work and run projects.

TCH is for the trades and for the businesses that keep them running: every licensed trade, plus the accountants, insurers, recruiters and suppliers a trade business leans on.

Join free from the button at the top of any page. The first five hundred businesses to publish a profile take a permanent founding number.

Browse the directory by category, then filter by region. Each profile shows credential badges, reviews, rates and availability.

Profiles carry licence and membership badges, including LBP, electrical, plumbing and Master Builders, alongside real reviews from past jobs. A badge we've checked shows Verified and the date; anything we haven't is marked self-declared. For statutory licences we link straight to the public register, so you can check the details yourself.

From their profile, with no account needed, once the business has claimed its listing: your enquiry goes straight to them with your contact details. A listing the business hasn't claimed yet says so and has no message form, because a message sent from it would reach nobody. Phone them if a number is listed, or post the job instead.

Yes. Post a job on the Jobs board and qualified professionals in your region respond with quotes you can compare.

Yes. Posting a job is free, and it stays free at launch.

It's a different model from lead-token marketplaces. You don't pay here to reach a customer: listing, being found and replying to enquiries are free, and what you pay for is running your own projects. And your licence can be verified at the source, with the date shown.

Verification confirms the credential existed on the public record on the date we checked. It is not a guarantee of workmanship, and we say so rather than imply otherwise. What you get from TCH is the paper trail: reviews tied to real jobs, decisions recorded in writing on project workspaces, and a complaints process a person actually reads.

A register worth searching. Joining TCH is free. Running your own projects as the operating business is what you pay for. We would rather be paid by businesses than paid per lead.

Our check ages out after twelve months and the badge drops to check expired on its own until we re-check. A lapsed licence never keeps wearing a current-looking badge.

Your account and profile details, your enquiries and, if you run projects here, the records you create. Email us from your account address and we will send you what we hold within the Privacy Act's timeframe, and correct or delete what we can legally delete. The privacy policy sets out what is collected, why, and who it is shared with.

A directory listing and business profile are free, with no card needed. Joining TCH is free. Running your own projects as the operating business is what you pay for, on Professional. See Membership & Pricing.

Complete your profile with services, rates, availability, your licences and a gallery, then tick 'List my business in the public directory'. Jobs in your trade and region land in your work inbox, and customers can enquire straight from your profile.

Enquiries sent from your profile appear in your dashboard with the customer's name, email and phone, so you can reply however suits you. You get an email notification the moment one lands. There is no fee per job.

The other businesses you regularly work with. Link them to your profile so customers can see and contact your trusted network from your page.

You can post a job for free from the Jobs page. Advertising is not on sale yet; the Advertise page lists what is planned and how to tell us what you are after.

The document you serve to ask for money under the Construction Contracts Act 2002. Section 20 sets what it has to carry: in writing, identifying the contract and the period claimed, stating the amount and the due date for payment, how that amount was worked out, and saying it is made under the Act. A claim raised in a TCH project is numbered and dated, and prints as a document you can send.

Yes, every one, and this one matters. The regulations' Form 1 sets out how to respond to the claim and what happens if the payer doesn't, and it must go with every payment claim, whoever the payer is. Before 1 December 2015 it was needed only where the payer was a residential occupier, so older guidance may say it is for homeowners only; for contracts entered into since then it is not. Every claim in TCH that is not a draft carries Form 1, in the regulations' words as they have stood since 1 December 2015: page 2 of the printed claim, and a section of the claim emails TCH sends to the payer. A claim you serve some other way needs the form with it too, and if you are not sure which form is current, ask your lawyer or your trade association.

It is the payer's written answer to a payment claim. Section 21 asks it to identify the claim, state the amount the payer will actually pay and, where that is less than the amount claimed, say how the scheduled amount was calculated, the reason for the difference, and the reason for withholding. The deadline is whatever your contract sets. Where the contract is silent, the Act's fallback is 20 working days after the claim was served. Most contracts are shorter, and NZS 3910 asks for 12, so treat 20 as the latest the date could possibly be rather than as your date.

The claimed amount becomes payable on the due date, and it can be recovered as a debt. The argument about what the work was actually worth is not available afterwards. It is the one deadline on a job that runs down on its own, which is why the attention list counts it in working days with the national public holidays and the 24 December to 5 January shutdown taken out, and warns before it expires rather than after. It does not take out your regional anniversary day: where one falls inside the window, the true date is one working day later than the one shown.

Yes. Schedule less than was claimed without saying how you reached the number and why, and the generator stops and names the element that is missing. Reasons are itemised with amounts, and the amounts have to account for the whole difference.

On trust for the party it was withheld from, from the moment it is withheld. Sections 18A to 18FC of the Act require it to be deposited into a bank account that complies with section 18E, accounted for separately, and reported to the party it belongs to. TCH keeps the ledger as retentions are withheld and released and produces a trust statement as at a date, which you can hand to a subcontractor or an auditor. If the record cannot be assembled in full, the statement says so on its face instead of printing a confident figure that might be wrong.

A variation is a change to the agreed scope, priced and agreed before it is built wherever that is possible. Day-work is work recorded by hours, plant and materials because it could not be priced first. Both are kept against the job with who asked for it, when, and what was agreed. The disagreement about them arrives months later, and by then the record is the only thing that settles it.

A request for information is a written question to the designer or the client when the drawings or the specification don't answer something, with the answer kept against the job. An answer given verbally on site is worth very little in a variation claim six months on.

The terms a party is engaged on, held with the job rather than in somebody's inbox: the scope and what it is worth. Claims are made against an agreement, so the agreement is what a claim and a schedule are measured against.

No. TCH produces documents in the shape the Construction Contracts Act asks for and counts the deadlines the Act sets. It has not read your contract, and your contract can set a shorter deadline than the Act's fallback. For anything that matters, take advice.

Members hiring their own plant out to each other. A digger standing idle for three weeks, offered to the trade at a day rate. Listing costs nothing.

A board for crew capacity between businesses: a team with a gap in their programme, and a builder who needs hands next week. Also free, and also on the phone.

No, and that is deliberate. There is no booking step on either board. Who employs whom, whose insurance covers what, and what happens if somebody is hurt on your site are settled between two businesses who then sign something. TCH makes the introduction and keeps the record. A Book crew button would imply an arrangement nobody drafted.

No. The board describes a crew, not people. Names, tickets and contact details of individuals stay with the business that employs them, because storing them here would make TCH the holder of employment records it has no relationship to.

Deadlines that are already running, read across every job you own and the business registers behind them. Payment schedules and unpaid claims, RFIs nobody has answered, variations and extensions waiting on a decision, retention due back, expired credentials, and enquiries nobody has replied to.

Because the list is ordered by what it costs to ignore for another day, not by how urgent it feels. The top band is for the things that turn into money owed or a statutory breach on their own, with nobody doing anything: nobody rings you about a payment schedule until it is too late. Below that come the things already overdue, then the ones due soon.

Only when the whole list could be read. If a register does not answer, the screen names it rather than quietly showing you a shorter morning.

Not yet. A morning digest that emails the same queue, worst first, is built and not yet switched on. When it is, it will not send when there is nothing to say, and every one will carry a working unsubscribe link.

One job, with everything about it in one place: the programme, the drawings, the documents, the site diary, the photos, the budget and its costs, the people on it, a chat room per job, and every contract register. Which of those a given person sees depends on their seat, not on their goodwill.

The build sequence, week by week, with each line's trade, duration and what it waits on. Marking progress against those lines is what the job's percentage complete is calculated from, and freezing a baseline is what lets the job say later which lines slipped and by how much.

The day's record: what happened, who was on site, and the photographs. It is the cheapest record on the platform to keep and the most valuable one to have when a variation or a delay claim is argued months later.

Everybody with a seat on the job, unless you have narrowed a seat. Drawings carry revisions, and superseding one keeps the old revision on file rather than deleting it, because which revision somebody built to is exactly the question that gets asked.

Yes. The job carries an audit trail of the commercial record, and it is owner-only. Claims, variations and the money decisions on a job are the ones people disagree about, so what changed, when, and who did it is kept.

Only you. The budget and the cost ledger are your margin, and no client seat or subcontractor seat can open them, whatever else you have granted.

Their own build: the programme, the payment claims addressed to them and what is outstanding, the variations put to them for a decision, the drawings and documents, the site diary and the photos. They can raise an RFI, because it is their own words rather than an edit to your records.

Your budget, your cost ledger, your margin, what you are paying any subcontractor, and any figure inside your own approval chain. That is the default, and it is enforced at the routes rather than by hiding it on screen.

The parts of the job that govern their work and keep them safe: the programme, the drawings and documents, the site diary, the RFIs they can raise and answer, and the variations raised against their own trade. Their own agreement, their own claims, and the retention held on them.

Head-contract money, another trade's prices, and any part of the budget. This is built into the platform, not a setting you have to remember.

Yes. Every register on a job can be granted, restricted or hidden per seat, and the job's own board shows the person what has been closed to them rather than pretending the door is not there. Narrowing a seat takes effect on the pages and on the routes at the same moment.

Three kinds: the things a job asks of you (an RFI to answer, a claim to certify, a variation waiting on a decision), the morning attention digest once it is switched on, and the transactional mail your own actions cause, like a claim you sent or a report you shared. The first two carry preferences you control, and every digest and alert carries a one-click unsubscribe that works. Transactional mail about your own account is the exception, and it is the one everybody keeps.

If you use the app and have allowed them, yes. A notification is never part of the transaction: the RFI answer is saved whether or not the push lands, so a phone that is off costs you a buzz and never a record.

From your account page. TCH uses an authenticator app: scan the code, then type the six digits back to prove you can read it. Until you have typed those digits the factor is not counted as protection, because a half-finished enrolment that shows as on is worse than one that shows as off.

A business account can download everything it holds as one file from the account page, whenever it likes. You can close your account from the same page, or in the app under More, then Account and security, and withdraw the request until it is done. We email you when it is. If you can't sign in, this page says how to ask by email, and what closing deletes and keeps.