Professional License Verification (PLV) helps manage risk, ensure compliance, and improve operational efficiency by automating the verification process. It reduces manual effort, maintains up-to-date license status, and improves overall trust. Automated PLV saves time and resources, ensuring licenses are current and valid, and significantly lowers the risk of non-compliance.
Let’s explore the benefits of PLV.
Managing Risk
In California1, construction projects costing $500 or more in both labor and material require a contractor license. If you hire a general contractor and they hire an unlicensed subcontractor, all work done on the job is put at risk. There can be fines, penalties, or potential legal action.
Ensuring Compliance
Verification demonstrates that not only are they compliant with the necessary regulatory requirements, but also that everything is in good standing. If you have a service marketplace, like Houzz for example, PLV allows you to show consumers that they are choosing service providers who can be trusted to do the work.
Why automate PLV?
Manual PLV is a barrier for small businesses because of the complexity based on license type and the effort of monitoring. It’s not just a matter of matching numbers. You need to confirm that the number provided exists. That the business name matches, the license is active, that it hasn’t been revoked, and you need to do this for every subcontractor on an ongoing basis to stay in compliance.
Scalable and accurate
Manual verification relies heavily on nothing changing. But the status of a license is far more dynamic than people realize. Licenses can expire, be revoked, or be suspended. Automated PLV not only uses fresh data to verify, but it continues to check the data to ensure that the license status is current. When you pull data from the original authorizing source, you’re ensuring that you’re using the most up-to-date information available to verify professional licenses.
Even within a single state, there are three levels (city, county, and state), as well as countless authorizing bodies that provide professional licenses, as you can see here on the State of Minnesota licensing website. An intelligence matching verification system solves the challenges associated with mismatched license numbers, similar business names, business names that have been updated, and other circumstances that can lead to verification issues.
Operational efficiencies
Imagine improving your service marketplace connection rate by 35% or driving 100% of your contractor license verification decisioning to 100%. With the right automation solution you can get the whole process down to about 90 seconds2.
Manual PLV is cost-prohibitive. This is especially true if you’re a business with a national presence. Professional licenses don’t just exist at one level of government. As mentioned above, some professional licenses are managed by several levels of government. You need to make sure that all these licenses are in order. Not only that, but if you’re using a manual set that relies on traditional paper files or calendars, it’s intensely time-consuming.
Automated PLV takes away the need to wade through multiple licensing boards across multiple jurisdictions in order to verify even a single license. You no longer need a team of people searching databases for the correct information.
Put verification on autopilot
When you don’t have to think about PLV, you greatly lower the risk of being non-compliant. Automation helps keep your PLV system going in the background through monitoring. This ensures that professional licenses stay current and valid, automatically, without having to schedule time to check manually.
If you’re looking to upgrade your existing PLV program with automation or learn more about bringing license verification into your business, let’s talk. Our verification experts are ready to help you understand how automated PLV can strengthen your business and remove any bottlenecks from your verification processes.
1California State License Board
2Averge Mesh P95 metric based on standard conditions.