← All posts · 2026-07-24

COI tracking for contractors: collect, chase, keep

A Certificate of Insurance is easy to collect and easy to forget. The gap between those two facts is where general contractors get burned: the vendor whose COI expired in March has an incident in June, and suddenly your insurance, your contract, and your client relationship are all in the conversation.

What to collect from every vendor

At minimum: the COI itself showing general liability, the expiration date, and the policy number. Depending on trade and state, you may also need workers comp, auto liability, and umbrella coverage. Decide your requirements once, write them down, and apply them to every vendor identically. Inconsistent requirements are worse than weak ones when a claim lands.

Track expirations like invoices, not like paperwork

Nobody forgets to send an invoice. COIs deserve the same machinery: a single list of every vendor, their expiration date, and days remaining, reviewed on a schedule instead of when someone remembers. The failure mode is never the spreadsheet being wrong; it is nobody having looked at it since February.

Chase before the lapse, not after

Thirty days out is the right first nudge: long enough for the vendor's agent to issue a renewal certificate, short enough to be concrete. The day it lapses, the conversation changes from a reminder to a stop-work decision, and stop-work decisions in the middle of a job cost real money.

Keep the paper

When a claim happens, the question is not whether the vendor is insured today. It is whether they were insured on the date of the incident. Keep every certificate you have ever collected, with upload dates. Storage is free; reconstructing coverage history from an inbox is not.

Make it the vendor's job

The most reliable COI process is one where the vendor uploads their own documents to a link you send them, and the system chases the expiration for you. Your job becomes reviewing exceptions instead of doing data entry.