Certificate Of Insurance Management System

A certificate of insurance management system is a tool that helps your risk management or compliance team manage the insurance risk generated by contractors, vendors, commercial tenants, or other third parties. If you were waiting for us to talk about reading COIs, verifying coverage, and communicating with agents, sure—these tools do all that.

But at myCOI we care more about your results than our processes. You manage COIs to manage risk. We could (and will) tell you about our OCR, our expert insurance team, and all the ways we’ve helped companies just like yours save time and money or improve their compliance rating.

But when you have to go to your boss or your board, you need to be able to say “our risk is under control” and know it’s a true statement. You need to be able to show fewer claims and a higher compliance rating.

Sometimes insurance software can meet some of these needs, but those software tools are not usually built to help you with certificate of insurance best practices. We built myCOI to meet exactly those needs: exactly what you need out of a certificate of insurance tracking app.

Let’s look at how some of this works.

How To Track Certificates Of Insurance

Certificate tracking is a necessity for any company that hires third parties such as contractors or vendors, and knowing how to track certificates of insurance for your company is a critical skill for any risk management team member, whether you use an app or not. A certificate of insurance tracking app is a type of software program that allows businesses to track certificates of insurance for their company. These apps are often less expensive than other types of solutions on the market because they don’t have recurring fees associated with them.

One of the most common mistakes that businesses make is not keeping accurate records of certificates of insurance. This puts them at risk for fines and penalties if they do not have up-to-date documentation on hand when requested by a third party, such as an attorney In addition to having legal consequences, failing to keep track of your company’s certificates could lead to financial losses. It also increases the likelihood of liability lawsuits filed against your business. Choosing a solid COI tracking solution that moves you past using a certificate of insurance tracking template or some other certification tracking spreadsheet is just smart business.

There are many benefits associated with using certificate tracking software that can help you avoid all these pitfalls: saving time, decreasing errors due to paperwork being misplaced or lost, saving money from avoiding fees tied into other solutions. Many of these solutions often allow you to request a certificate of insurance online.

However you are tracking your certificates now, it’s never a bad idea to audit what you’re doing and see if there’s a better way.

Certificate Of Insurance Management Software

Certificate of insurance management software is one of the most important purchases your risk management team can make, and that importance only scales up as the number of COIs you need to track increases. At myCOI, we’re devoted to erasing the worry of certificate of insurance tracking, by using our industry-leading software and services to make sure your COIs are compliant when you accept them and across the lifetime of your contract with your third party.

There are other solutions, of course. And many of them may be the right choice for your business, but myCOI has spent more than a decade ensuring that we’re the right choice for almost any company. We offer the best technology backed up by the very best team of insurance professionals.

And no one—no one—cares more than we do.

If you’re comparing a couple of COI management systems against each other, pay attention to things like this:

• Can the solution verify compliance against certificate of insurance requirements by state?
• Can it read both typed and handwritten COIs?
• Is it backed by a team of insurance professionals, or are you putting all of your faith (and your risk) in a machine?
• Does it meet all the individual needs you have for your business and your compliance team?

Take demos from all of them. Go in with a list of questions. And don’t leave that demo until you have your questions answered.

Certificate Of Insurance

The concept of a certificate of insurance is not a new one. In a very basic form, you probably have a certificate of your auto insurance in your car or your wallet. The form is a bit more complex for business general liability insurance, but the concept is the same: a document issued by an insurer saying that the bearer is insured against certain actions to certain levels of protection.

Most agents or brokers will give you a certificate automatically, or offer you a way to request your certificate of insurance online via their website.

Now that we’ve talked about how important certificates of insurance are, let’s look at certificate of insurance 101. By far the most common general liability form is the ACORD 25 general liability insurance form, and you can see an example of this form from almost anywhere that provides certificate of insurance PDFs.

All of the fields are clearly labeled, and your agent or broker should provide it to you already filled out, but let’s look at the high points. The Insured box should have your name or your company’s name in it since it’s certifying your insurance. Depending on your coverage, you may see values in the General Liability box, the Automobile Liability box, or the Umbrella/Excess Liability box, and so on. These details matter, because you can trust then that the certificate of insurance explained your coverage to the certificate holder.

Knowing how to get an insurance certificate online is only useful if you’re carrying the correct kind and amount of coverage for your situation. Knowing what is correct is a conversation you have with your hiring entity and your agent or broker.

COI Tracking Spreadsheet

If you’re looking for a simple and manual way to track the certificates of insurance in your business, then using a COI tracking spreadsheet is an option worth considering. Many companies begin by having their staff track insurance policies on Excel spreadsheets. For basic certificate of insurance tracking spreadsheets are not a bad solution, but as a full-function insurance tracker Excel has limitations.

Many companies find spreadsheets a good training tool; for a certificate of insurance tracking template Excel has several basic templates that can be customized to what you need, but most companies scale past this very quickly.

The drawbacks of using an Excel insurance tracker are that it can be time-consuming to maintain and often require constant updating. What began as a simple project one person could track and easily snowball into a time-intensive process that’s impossible to scale as a company grows. Instead, companies might add more people and more spreadsheets, which leads to paperwork being lost or misplaced, which leads to increased chances for errors in the data.

That is exactly the worry that myCOI erases. Our systems are industry-leading. Our insurance professionals are top-notch. If you’re tracking hundreds of certificates of insurance, we’d love the chance to show you just how much time and effort we can save you.

Certificate Of Insurance Compliance

Knowing how to organize certificates of insurance for tracking is a necessity for any company that hires third parties such as contractors or vendors. A certificate of insurance tracking solution allows businesses to track certificate of insurance compliance

One of the most common mistakes that businesses make is not keeping accurate records of certificates of insurance. This puts them at risk for fines and penalties if they do not have up-to-date documentation on hand when requested by a third party, such as an attorney. In addition to having legal consequences, failing to keep track of your company’s certificates could lead to financial losses. It also increases the likelihood of liability lawsuits filed against your business. Knowing which vendors need a certificate of insurance is one of the core components of risk management.

Here’s a hint: the answer is all of them. Any vendor doing work for you needs a COI. And knowing how to request a certificate of insurance from a vendor should be onboarding-level training for most risk teams.

It’s not just those who hire contractors and vendors that need to track certificates of insurance. Property managers who host commercial tenants also need to ensure those tenants are carrying the proper insurance. We often see the duty of securing and verifying these COIs fall on property managers, instead of dedicated risk teams, so we strongly suggest having on hand a sample letter requesting a certificate of insurance from commercial tenants, so you can quickly request the COIs you need to manage your property’s risk.

Insurance Policy Tracking Software

At myCOI we talk to a lot of companies that have a solution that kind of works. Sometimes that solution is a spreadsheet. Other times that solution is some form of insurance policy tracking software that offers little more functionality than a spreadsheet would. And while there are undoubtedly myriad companies out there doing exactly that and seeing success, that’s not the best fit for every company.

Consider this question: you have a spreadsheet of several hundred or thousand rows, each row being a COI that needs to be tracked. New COIs get appended to the bottom of the spreadsheet as they’re added. This spreadsheet has been assembled across years, worked on by multiple employees, and saved in the cloud.

When was the last time you looked at the top of that spreadsheet when your day-to-day is at the bottom? That’s a lot of scrolling. Trust us: we have spreadsheets here, too. We know how it is.

Unless your insurance software knows how to check certificate of insurance details, to confirm the coverage listed matches the coverage you require from your third parties, and to verify that the coverage listed is still in force, you’re probably going to come up short.

myCOI’s solutions can do all of that.

Free COI Tracking Software

Running a business is expensive, and sometimes the last thing you want to add is another expense, even when you have a need. We can’t tell you how many times we’ve heard companies tell us that they were doing their best: they knew about COI tracking software, but the budget was just too tight, so they did it with Excel or a free COI tracking software. For a while, they did okay. Sometimes they tried to make do with insurance tracking software or apps.

But their compliance percentage slipped down a little every month, as their business grew and more and more certificates were received. Each of those certificates had to be tracked and verified. Each month, more certificates than the last.

At a certain point, the amount of unnecessary risk they were assuming got to be too much, and they had to look for a more professional solution. Sometimes it’s because their risk management team or general counsel audits and realizes the exposure. Sometimes a new hire discovers a distressing reality that had gone unnoticed.

Unfortunately, sometimes it’s because the company just had to pay a damaging claim that they should have been covered for.

Free COI tracking software is not inherently bad, and almost no one sets out to make bad software. But it takes a dedication to customer service, a mission to erase worry, and a team of insurance professionals like the one we’ve assembled at myCOI to make sure your company is doing all it needs to with its certificates of insurance.

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