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Spreadsheets
A grid you build yourself, for the things a compliance product has no field for — and a way to attach a file to it that turns into a tracked document, if you tell it to.
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 is the same freedom with two differences: it can be attached to a subcontractor or a project, so it is findable from the record it is about, and a file you attach to it can be read.
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
You can attach files to a sheet — a PDF, a photograph taken on site, or a spreadsheet workbook. When you do, you pick one of two things, and this is the choice worth understanding because the two look identical for the first ten seconds and are completely different afterwards.
| You choose | What Sealinn does | What it does NOT do |
|---|---|---|
| Auto — read anything | Reads whatever is clearly labeled on the file and fills the sheet's grid with it. Works on a workbook, a photograph or a PDF. | It is not a compliance document. No requirement is measured, nothing enters the review queue, and no expiry is tracked. |
| A named type — certificate, W-9, license, safety card | Creates a real document against the assigned subcontractor: read against your requirements, flagged if short, into the review queue, on the reminder cadence. | It does not stop being a sheet. The grid stays, and the document is shown alongside it. |
The named-type 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 hold several compliance documents at once — a certificate, a W-9 and a license attached over three weeks are three documents on one sheet, each with its own status and its own review. Attaching a second does not replace the first.
Attached under Auto and it turns out to be a certificate?
The reader will say so. When a generically-read file looks like a compliance document, the sheet offers to apply the full treatment — read it against your requirements and put it in the review queue — or to leave it as data. Choosing to leave it is remembered, so you are not asked again about the same file.
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.
The columns nobody built you a field for.
Kept next to the record they are about, instead of on a drive that drifts.