What WorkZerk does

WorkZerk collects paperwork from the staff and contractors you onboard, and then remembers it. Everything below expands on that one line.

This article is the "is this the right tool for me" read. If you already know it is and you want to build something, go straight to the getting started guide, which walks through a first portal end to end.

The problem it exists for

Most organizations collect the same pack from every new contractor or staff member: an insurance certificate, a license, bank details, a signed agreement, an induction they have to actually complete. Almost nobody has a system for it. It gets done over email.

Email is fine for the sending part. It falls apart on the four things that come after:

• Chasing. Three people out of twenty replied. Working out which three, and nudging the rest without nudging the three, is a manual job you do again every week.
• Filing. Attachments land in an inbox. Somebody drags them into folders, or nobody does.
• Expiry. A certificate of currency was valid when it arrived. Eleven months later nothing tells you it is about to lapse, and you find out when you need it.
• Proof. Somebody signed a policy two years ago. Which version? The one on your server now, or the one that was current then? An email thread cannot answer that.

WorkZerk is built around those four, not around the sending. The sending is the easy part.

How it works, in one pass

You create a portal, which is a container for one kind of intake: contractor onboarding, a new starter pack, a site induction. You list what you want inside it: files to upload, questions to answer, terms to sign, checklists to work through.

Then you add people to it. Each person gets a private link. No account, no password, no app. They open it, do what they can, close it, come back later, and their progress is kept.

As things come back you approve or reject them, and WorkZerk takes over the chasing: who is still outstanding, whose documents expire soon, who never opened their link. Everything files itself against that person's contact record, which is the part that outlasts the intake. Next year you are not starting from an empty inbox, you are looking at a person who already has a history.

What makes it different from a form builder

The difference from a form builder is what happens after submit.

A form builder is oriented around the submission: a row in a spreadsheet, one moment in time, complete or not. WorkZerk is oriented around the person: their documents, their expiry dates, their signed versions, their history across every intake they have been through with you. Ask a contractor for their license number once and it lives on their contact record, ready to read next year without going back through submissions.

That difference shows up in the things a form cannot do at all:

• A document has a life. An upload can carry an expiry date, which puts it on your renewal list automatically and gives you a one-click prompt for a fresh copy when the date approaches.
• An acceptance is pinned to a version. When someone signs a set of terms, the exact wording they agreed to is frozen at that moment. Publishing a new version later never rewrites what somebody already signed.
• A rejection is part of the flow. You can send a file back with a reason, and the person is asked again for the right one. "This is the certificate of currency, we need the policy schedule" is one click instead of a thread.
• The list is conditional. A question can reveal a whole block of follow-up questions based on the answer, or based on which group the person is in, so a twelve-item list stays a four-item list for most people.

Who it is for

Anyone who onboards staff or contractors repeatedly and needs the paperwork to hold up later:

• Contractors and subcontractors: insurance, licenses, a signed agreement and a site induction, with the expiry dates watched for you.
• New staff: personal details, bank and tax, right to work, policy acknowledgements and a first-week checklist.
• Anyone with a compliance obligation that depends on producing, a year from now, the document a specific person gave you and the version of the policy they agreed to.

The same setup works for volunteers, members or tenants, since a portal asks whatever you put in it.

The common thread is repetition plus consequence. If you onboard two people a year and nothing depends on the paperwork, email is fine.

What it deliberately does not do

So you are not looking for a screen that is not there:

• No invoicing or payments. WorkZerk does not raise invoices, take card payments or connect to accounting software.
• No calendar or scheduling. Portals have no dates, and there is no calendar or appointment booking.
• No payroll, shift rostering or timesheets. It collects the documents around employment, not the employment itself.
• No sites or locations. There is nowhere to file portals by depot or region. Tags on a contact are the closest thing, and they group people rather than portals.
• No company records. A contact is a person. There is no organization record that groups the people from one contractor firm.
• No sending from your own email domain. Emails to your people go out from WorkZerk's own address.
• It is not a document editor. You paste your terms in and upload reference files. You write and design documents elsewhere.

It is also not a replacement for your HR or job-management system. It is the intake layer in front of one, and the record of what people gave you.

What it costs to run

WorkZerk counts the distinct people who have a live link on an open portal. Closing a portal you have finished with keeps everything readable and keeps every document on the contact record, but stops those people counting. That makes closing finished intakes ordinary housekeeping rather than something you avoid in case you lose the records.

There is a 30-day free trial with no credit card. See the pricing page for what your plan includes, what counts as an active person for the detail, and managing billing for the account side of it.

Where to go next

• Getting started builds a first portal end to end. Start here.
• Sidebar navigation and search is the tour of the app itself, if you would rather get oriented before building.
• What your people see on their portal shows the other side of the link, which is worth reading before you send one to anybody.