How to Collect Vendor Certificates of Insurance

To collect certificates of insurance from vendors, request a current certificate before each vendor begins work, and a fresh one every policy term, with your coverage requirements stated up front so the certificate comes back right the first time. The hard part isn't knowing to do it; it's the chasing. This is a process that keeps the chasing to a minimum.

The collection process

1. State the requirements up front. Tell the vendor exactly what you need: coverage types, minimum limits, additional insured status, any endorsements, so their broker issues a certificate that matches.
2. Request early. Ask before the engagement starts, not after, so a missing or short certificate doesn't hold up work.
3. Make it easy to send. The vendor usually forwards your request to their broker, who prepares the certificate. The fewer steps between "broker has it" and "you have it," the faster it lands.
4. Confirm and record. When the certificate arrives, record its coverages and dates so you can track the expiration.

Why email collection drags

By email, every certificate is a small project: request, wait, follow up, receive, file. Across many vendors, the follow-ups pile up, and certificates trickle in slowly or not at all. The vendors aren't the bottleneck so much as the round-trips.

Removing the back-and-forth

Atlasafe gives each vendor's broker a secure magic-link upload page with no account or login required. The broker clicks the link and uploads the certificate straight to you, and Atlasafe records the coverages and dates you enter or that its OCR reads from the document for you to review. That turns a string of emails into a single upload, and every collected certificate is already in the system, ready for expiration tracking.