How to Give Contractors Access to Drawings Without Losing Control of Them

Every project reaches the moment where an outside firm needs your drawings. A mechanical sub needs the Level 3 plans. A consultant needs the existing conditions. A vendor needs one detail to fabricate against.

What happens next is usually one of three things, and all three cause problems later.

The three bad options

Email a ZIP file. It is stale the instant it lands. Issue a revision tomorrow and there is now a folder on someone's laptop containing superseded drawings with no indication they're superseded. You cannot revoke it, you cannot tell who opened it, and you have no idea how many times it was forwarded.

Share a login. Now two firms use one account. Your audit trail records that "the contractor account" opened a file — not which person at which company. When the sub demobilizes, you either change the password (breaking it for everyone) or leave a working credential in the hands of a firm that left months ago.

Drop it in consumer cloud storage. Link-sharing defaults are generous and easy to get wrong. "Anyone with the link" is one forward away from "anyone," and those links have a habit of outliving the project by years.

The thread connecting all three: access is all-or-nothing, and it never ends.

What good external access looks like

The goal isn't to make sharing harder. It's to make the right sharing easy enough that nobody reaches for a ZIP file.

Scope to the project, not the company. A sub working on one renovation should see that project's documents — not your entire facility archive going back thirty years. This is the single highest-value control, and the one most often skipped because it's inconvenient to set up.

Match the permission to the job. Not everyone needs the same rights:

• View — can open drawings on site. Right for most field crews.
• Download — can take files offline. Right for people fabricating or estimating against them.
• Comment — can respond and mark things up without changing your records.

Defaulting everyone to full access is how documents end up somewhere you didn't intend.

Give every person their own identity. Individual accounts are what make an audit trail meaningful. "Someone from the mechanical sub opened the Level 3 plans" is not an answer when an owner asks who had the superseded set.

Plan the offboarding at onboarding. The question isn't whether a sub gets access — it's how access ends. Decide that on day one, because nobody remembers to clean up during closeout.

Point them at the live document, not a copy. The whole reason to share through a system is that the sub sees the current revision. A copy is a fork; a link is the truth.

A checklist worth stealing

When a new firm comes onto a project:

1. Confirm which project they need — and only that one
2. Pick the lowest permission level that lets them do the work
3. Give each person their own login, never a shared one
4. Note the expected end date somewhere you'll actually see it
5. At closeout, remove access and spot-check the audit log

Step 5 takes about two minutes and is skipped on nearly every project. It's also the step an owner's security review will ask about.

How ArchiveView handles it

ArchiveView treats external firms as first-class but scoped. You add a contractor organization and grant it access to specific projects — they see those documents and nothing else in your library. Each grant carries a permission level of view, download, or comment, so a fabricator can pull files while a field crew is read-only.

Access is reversible without collateral damage. You can suspend a contractor while a dispute is sorted out, remove a single project when that scope finishes, or remove the organization entirely at closeout — none of which disturbs your own team's access. Because every user signs in as themselves, the audit log shows which person opened which document.

The commercial model matches the shape of the work: contractor access is $199 per project, not a monthly per-seat fee. You are not paying year-round for a sub who was on site for six weeks — which is precisely the incentive that pushes people toward emailing ZIPs in the first place.

For your own staff, single sign-on handles the same problem from the other direction: people arrive and leave through your identity provider, and offboarding is one switch.

Want to see per-project access set up against your own structure? Request a demo, or read more about facility document management.