Which insurances, bonds and warranties need tracking on a live job?

The honest answer is that you track whatever the contract and its schedules require, because the schedule of cover is specific to the deal and amendments frequently change it, but a live job almost always carries the same families. There are the insurances: the contractor's or subcontractor's public liability and employer's liability, the contract works or all-risks cover, and professional indemnity where any party is designing, each with a required level and renewal date. There is the performance bond, where the contract calls for one, typically in place before work starts and often carrying an expiry. There are the collateral warranties owed to third parties, funders, purchasers, tenants, and sometimes owed to you from those below, often promised at the start and quietly never executed. And there is retention or a retention bond in its place. The discipline is tracking all of it in both directions, cover you must hold and cover owed to you, because the second fails just as silently as the first and leaves you just as exposed. For each item the register should hold the level required, the date it expires or renews, and who owes what to whom, so a renewal is flagged before it lapses, a missing warranty is chased while there is still leverage, and a shortfall is raised the month it opens rather than the day a claim lands in it.

Consider a small main contractor on a JCT job for a developer, where the contract required a performance bond before commencement, collateral warranties to the funder and the eventual purchaser, and professional indemnity from a design-and-build subcontractor. The paperwork drifted: the bond was arranged three months late, the warranties were unexecuted at practical completion, and nobody had confirmed the design subcontractor's professional indemnity level. None of it hurt until a cladding defect emerged in year two: the purchaser's warranty did not exist to sign, the design subcontractor's cover was a fraction of what the contract required, and the argument that followed was made harder by cover that had never been secured. Had a register flagged each item at the start and chased the warranties while final payment was still leverage, every document would have existed when needed, and the defect would have been a question of who pays rather than whether anyone can.