Accounting Ledgers Versus Insurance Ledgers: Why Every Dollar of Coverage Matters

If your organization’s accounting team was off by $100 or $1,000 dollars in their ledger, wouldn’t the team work hard to try and find why the money was off? Doesn’t every dollar matter when it comes to ensuring your accounts are balanced?

The same should be just as true for your compliance team that’s in charge of ensuring the proper coverage for all of your third party vendors, subcontractors, and anyone else that your organization does business with on a regular basis. If coverages were off and left your organization susceptible to claims or costly lawsuits, wouldn’t you want to know if the coverage wasn’t exactly what it was supposed to be?

Why Every Dollar of Insurance Coverage Matters

If your current certificate of insurance compliance process is manual or has multiples steps in the process, it could mean that your administrative or contract staff is missing critical elements of compliance. And if you don’t have a checks and balances system in place to be sure every individual is properly covered, then your third party vendors or subcontractors could be working on a job without having proper coverage that meets your organization’s compliance standards.

These considerations all lead us to address why tracking and managing certificates can mean saving your organization thousands of dollars as well as many hours of your employees’ time. But perhaps most importantly? Tracking certificates and coverage down to the dollar can give your team peace of mind that your insurance ‘ledger’ isn’t off by $100, $1,000, or perhaps much, much more.

What Happens If Coverage Isn’t Correct?

Manual certificate of insurance tracking can be like placing dominos. Each time you begin working with a new third party, your team carefully places each new domino in its proper place. While your team might be able to keep stacking documents one on top of each other for a long period of time, one day the whole line of dominos could come crumbling down if one piece doesn’t hold up.

As third party vendors or subcontractors try to reduce costs by trimming coverages, the risk of non-compliance continues to grow. Is your staff keeping track of individual contracts that outline specific requirements? Do they know just how much coverage and what endorsements are required for every contract?

If your organization is collecting certificates just to confirm they were received, then there is no guarantee that the requirements are actually being met, which could mean that your organization might just have non-compliant workers without your staff even realizing it. Tracking and managing certificates of insurance to confirm all limits, endorsements, and insurance requirements are in place allows your business to transfer costly claims and other exposures to your vendors. If your organization fails to do that and your certificates aren’t trackable or managed correctly, you’re posing major risk to your bottom line.

Let Lumie handle the paperwork

Keeping every certificate current is a lot to ask of any team. illumend, from myCOI, reads each certificate and endorsement against your requirements, flags what’s missing, and follows up with your third-party partners for you. You’ll see who’s covered, and who isn’t, without chasing a single email.

Want to see it in your workflow? Schedule a demo and we’ll show you how illumend fits.