How to Track Certificates of Insurance (COIs): A Practical Guide

If you let vendors or subcontractors work on your property, you're relying on their insurance to respond when something goes wrong. When a vendor's policy has lapsed and you didn't catch it, the claim can land on you — and on your own policy. The International Risk Management Institute has noted that roughly 40% of businesses allow vendors on site without verifying current coverage.

The core discipline is simple to describe and hard to sustain manually: collect a certificate, verify it meets your requirements, store it, and re-collect it before it expires — for every vendor, forever.

Before collecting anything, decide what 'compliant' means. Typical requirements include a minimum general liability limit (often $1M per occurrence / $2M aggregate), workers' compensation, and specific endorsements such as additional insured and waiver of subrogation.

The slowest part of COI tracking is chasing vendors for paperwork. Make it easy on them: send a single link where they can submit their certificate without creating an account. The lower the friction, the faster you get compliant certificates back.

A certificate on file isn't the same as a compliant vendor. Check that coverage types are present, limits meet your minimums, required endorsements are in force, and — critically — that the policy hasn't expired. This is where manual tracking most often fails: the certificate looks official, so it gets filed without a real check.

Every certificate expires. The single highest-value automation is a reminder that fires before expiry — to the vendor to re-submit, and to you if they don't. This is the one thing a spreadsheet fundamentally cannot do, and it's what prevents the 'we didn't know it lapsed' incident.

For a handful of vendors, a spreadsheet works. Past that, it becomes a liability: no reminders, no verification, and one stale row can mean six-figure exposure. Dedicated COI software automates collection, verification, and renewals — turning hours of weekly chasing into a glance at a dashboard.