Spreadsheets

What it is for

Every contractor tracks something the product does not have a field for. Bond numbers. Who signed which subcontract and when. A punch list of paperwork chased by phone. Rates. The four columns your controller wants that nobody else needs.

The usual answer is a second spreadsheet on a shared drive, which is exactly the thing this product exists to get you out of — and which drifts from the real record within a month. A sheet here gives you the same freedom with one reliable difference: it can be attached to a subcontractor or project, so it is findable from the record it is about. Generic file reading is not currently supported.

Sheets are a reviewer-level surface. The people who can approve documents can create and edit them; the rest of your team cannot — which roles hold that permission is the same split that governs the review queue.

The grid

Add rows and columns as you need them, name the headers, type in the cells. Everything saves as you go — there is no save button and no unsaved state to lose. Column widths and row heights drag to fit and are remembered with the sheet, so a column of long notes stays readable for whoever opens it next.

The whole sheet exports as Excel or CSV, which matters for the case this feature is most used for: somebody outside Sealinn has asked for a list, and they want it in a format they can sort.

Attaching a file, and the choice that decides everything after

For new attachments, Sealinn exposes only the declared COI path. The generic Auto upload and AI-read path is unavailable; unknown bytes are not sent to a provider to guess their document type.

The COI option appears only once the sheet is assigned to a subcontractor, and the reason is structural rather than a rule somebody chose: a compliance document belongs to a company. There is nowhere to file a certificate that is not somebody's.

A sheet can retain several authorized historical documents, so an older W-9 or license already on the record does not disappear. New attachments are COI-only, and each new certificate keeps its own status and review; attaching a renewal does not erase the earlier record.

Where a sheet shows up elsewhere

A sheet assigned to a subcontractor appears on that subcontractor's documents tab, so somebody opening the record finds it without knowing it exists.

In the org-wide file list a sheet appears once, and which row it appears as depends on what is on it. A sheet with no compliance document is listed as a spreadsheet. A sheet whose attached certificate has been approved is listed as that certificate — with the document's type, its status and its expiry — and opening the row takes you to the sheet. That is deliberate: a certificate that happens to live on a sheet is still a certificate, and it should survive a filter for certificates rather than hiding behind a different word.

Deleting one, and why you cannot always reassign it

Deleting a sheet does not take its compliance documents with it. They are detached and survive as ordinary documents against the subcontractor, keeping their status, their expiry and their history — you are deleting your working notes, not the certificate. The files attached under Auto do go, because they have no home outside the sheet.

Reassigning a sheet to a different subcontractor is refused while a compliance document is attached to it, and the message says so. That is not an arbitrary lock: a certificate belongs to the company that issued it, and letting a sheet drag one to a different subcontractor would put somebody else's insurance on the wrong record. Detach the documents first, or leave them and start a new sheet.

Both operations are written to the audit log with a name and a timestamp, so a sheet that disappeared has an explanation. And if what you actually want is a list rather than a workspace, the four reports may already answer it without a sheet at all.