Gravity Forms
+ Document Expiry Tracker

Contractors, volunteers, staff and suppliers often have to give you dated documents: insurance certificates, first aid certificates, trade licences, background checks. Collecting them is the easy part; keeping track of when each one expires is not. The Gravity Forms Document Expiry Tracker add-on adds a Documents field to your forms where people upload each document with its number, issue date and expiry date, keeps every version per person and company, and reminds people before their documents expire.

Reminders are ordinary Gravity Forms notifications on new events (document expires soon, document expired, document approved or rejected), sent by a daily job a set number of days before the expiry date and on the expiry date, each one exactly once. Every reminder can carry a signed replace link that opens your form for that one document and saves the upload as a new version of the same record, with the history kept. Your team can approve or reject new uploads with a note.

The dashboard shows which documents are expiring soon, which have expired, which required documents are missing and which are waiting for review, per person and company, with filters and CSV export. Uploaded files are encrypted in a private folder and only handed out after a permission check, and logged-in people can see their own documents with a shortcode. Which documents you need and what you accept is up to your organisation; the add-on tracks and reminds. Everything runs on your own server, with no outside connection. For Gravity Forms 2.9 and newer.

When a form with a Documents field is sent, every row is checked: the type must be one the form offers, the file must pass the Gravity Forms upload rules, and the expiry date must be a real future date. Each file is then encrypted and saved under a random name in a private folder, and each document becomes a version of the record for that person and type, so sending the same type again adds to the history instead of replacing it. A daily job looks at every document with an expiry date. When the day of a reminder comes, it claims that reminder for the document's current version (a database key makes sure it can only happen once) and sends the Gravity Forms notifications for that event through the entry the document came from, with the {doc:...} merge tags filled in. From the expiry date the document counts as expired. The replace link carries the document and version numbers, an expiry time and a signature made with a secret key on your site; the add-on refuses it when anything was changed, when it is too old or when the document has already been replaced. Everything happens on your own server — the add-on makes no outside HTTP request beyond the licence and update checks.