How to Track Certificates of Insurance

COI tracking is the ongoing process of collecting certificates of insurance from your vendors, contractors, and partners, checking each one against the coverage you require, and monitoring expiration dates so a certificate never lapses unnoticed. It matters because an uninsured vendor's mistake can become your loss, and a certificate that expired three months ago offers no protection.

The three steps of COI tracking

1. Collect. Get a current certificate from every vendor before work starts, and a fresh one each policy term. Chasing these by email is the slow part; a way for a vendor's broker to upload directly to you removes most of the friction.
2. Review. Check that the certificate meets the requirements you set: coverage limits at or above your minimums, the correct named insured, in-force dates, any required endorsements, and additional insured status where your contract calls for it.
3. Monitor. Watch every certificate's expiration date and start collecting the renewal before it lapses. This is continuous, not one-time.

Why monitoring is where programs break

Collecting and reviewing are one-time events per certificate; monitoring never stops. A spreadsheet holds the dates but does not act on them. Someone has to open it and notice that a vendor's coverage expires next week. Across dozens of vendors, that manual watch is exactly what fails, and certificates lapse in the gap between "we have it on file" and "it's still current."

Record your requirements so gaps are visible

The point of a certificate is to confirm a vendor meets your requirements. Write those requirements down: the minimum limits, the endorsements, the additional insured status, and record them alongside each vendor. When a requirement is defined, a certificate that falls short of it becomes something you can see, instead of something you'd have to catch by eye.

Where Atlasafe fits

Atlasafe is built for the requestor side of COI tracking. Vendors and their brokers upload certificates to you through a secure magic-link portal with no login required, and Atlasafe records the coverages and dates you enter or that its OCR reads from the uploaded document for you to review. It then watches every expiration and reminds you by email and in-app before a certificate lapses, and flags a certificate that falls short of the requirements you defined.

What Atlasafe does not do is decide whether a vendor is truly compliant or adequately covered. It surfaces the facts (limits, dates, gaps) and helps you stay on top of them; the judgment, and the coverage authority, stay with you, your vendors' carriers, and your brokers. A green screen in Atlasafe is a well-run tracking process, not a legal determination of compliance. Certificates you track count toward the same policy meter the published pricing tiers use.