You did not climb the roof. A 1099 crew lead did, because you had three inspections on the board and one truck, or because that is simply how your company runs. The homeowner does not know the difference and should not have to. Six months from now, neither should you.
That is the whole problem with subcontracted inspections. The work gets done. The record, the process and the customer experience quietly become somebody else's, and you find out the day you need them.
Contractor inspection management starts with who owns the record
Settle this before the sub's first job, not after. The inspection was sold under your name, the homeowner called your number, and if there is a question in March it comes to you. So the record belongs to your company, full stop, and the sub is performing the inspection on your behalf.
That sounds obvious until you look at where the media actually lands. A sub who shoots on their own phone and texts you the good ones has handed you a curated summary of an inspection, not the inspection. The rest stays on a device you do not control, belonging to a person you do not employ, who may be working for somebody else next month. Chain of custody for field media covers why that breaks; the short version is that a record you have to ask for is not your record.
The fix is structural, not a conversation. The sub works inside your system, under a seat you issue, so whatever they capture lands with the company the moment it is captured. Not emailed after. Not shared from a personal drive. Landed.
Same walk, different truck
Your own inspectors have a method, or should. Slope by slope, penetrations counted, narrate as you go, say out loud what you cannot see. A sub arrives with their own habits, which may be fine and may not be, and you will not find out from the photos.
Hand them the method in writing before the first job. One page. The order you walk, what gets shot, what gets said. Not because a good sub needs telling, but because "our way" is not knowable from outside, and the goal is that an inspection by a sub reads the same in the file as one by your best in-house person. Standardizing across inspectors goes through what belongs on that page. The point here is that it applies harder to somebody who is not in your shop every morning.
The office reviews it the same day
An in-house inspector's work gets reviewed by osmosis. They come back, you ask how it went, you hear the tone in their voice. A sub drives off. If nobody looks at the record until there is a reason to, the first review is the adversarial one.
So put a review step on it. Somebody in the office opens the inspection the same day, watches enough to know the walk was complete, checks the penetration count against the imagery, confirms the media is all there and nothing failed. Ten minutes. If something is missing, the sub is still in the area and the homeowner is still expecting a follow-up. Next week, neither is true.
Better still, have the reviewer watch live. An office person following the stream can ask "what about the far side of the chimney" while the sub is standing next to it, which is the only moment that question costs nothing. It also means the first person from your company to see that roof saw it while it was being inspected, not from a folder afterward.
What the homeowner should not be able to tell
The homeowner should not be able to tell it was a sub. Not because you are hiding anything, but because the experience they bought is your company's, and it should not depend on which truck showed up.
Concretely: the link they get should come from your company and look like your company. The person on the roof introduces themselves and says who they are with. The walk sounds like your other walks, because it follows the same page. And the follow-up comes from your office, not from the sub's personal number, so the relationship stays where the accountability is.
None of this is about distrust. Good subs prefer it. They want the record to sit with the company that sold the job, because it means the question in March goes to you and not to them.
When the arrangement ends
Subs cycle through faster than employees. Decide now what happens after the last job: the seat gets turned off, the inspections stay, with the sub's name still on them. Access ends; the record does not. If your setup cannot separate those two things, fix that before the first sub, not after the last.
What makes all of this manageable is that the record was never on their phone to begin with. The sub goes live, the homeowner taps a texted link and watches from the driveway with no app and no account, and the whole inspection records automatically and lands with your company. On the Crew plan and up, the viewer page carries your company's branding, and every inspector, employee or sub, works from a seat you control. How seats, roles and private recordings are handled is on the security page, and if you want to see what a sub's inspection looks like from the office side before you trust one with a customer, every plan opens with a free week.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.