On a job with twenty subcontractors, subcontractor insurance review is not one task. It is twenty reviews against requirements that came down from the owner, repeated every time a policy renews, tracked against a schedule that does not care when policy periods end.
Verisova reviews each subcontractor’s certificate against the requirements recorded for the project they are working on, and keeps that review where the project can see it.
Certificates Before Work Begins
The certificate has to be reviewed before mobilisation, which in practice means it is reviewed under time pressure — the sub is scheduled, the crew is booked, and the certificate arrived this morning. That is exactly the condition under which a short limit gets waved through.
Uploading it and reading the findings takes the same few minutes whether the certificate is clean or not, which is the point: the review does not get shorter because the schedule is tight.
A Realistic Subcontractor Workflow
A sub is awarded a scope
Their contract carries insurance requirements — limits, additional insured status, waiver of subrogation, sometimes primary and noncontributory wording. Those requirements are recorded against the project, not against the company, because the next project’s owner requirements will differ.
Their certificate arrives before mobilisation
The certificate is uploaded and read: named insured, carriers, policy numbers, effective and expiration dates, each-occurrence and aggregate limits, additional insured wording, description of operations and any endorsements named.
The certificate is measured against the scope
Limits are compared against the project minimums, the certificate holder against the entity the project expects, required endorsements against what the document evidences, and expiration against the project’s start and end dates.
Exceptions go back to the sub or their broker
Each finding names the field, the value read and the requirement it missed, which is what a broker needs to issue a corrected certificate. Verisova gives you the producer and policy number to raise it with.
The sub is cleared, and stays monitored
The review is kept against the project. Expiration keeps being checked against the current date and the project timeline, so a policy that renews mid-job does not stay approved on the strength of the certificate it replaced.
Requirements Are Project-Specific
Insurance requirements on a general contractor’s work come from somewhere else — the owner’s contract — and they change from job to job. Verisova records them per project for that reason:
- Owner requirements that differ from job to job, and flow down to subs unevenly
- A subcontractor whose limits clear one project’s threshold and not the next
- Additional insured requirements that name a different entity per project
- Project dates that outrun the policy period the certificate was issued under
- Trade-specific requirements applied to some scopes and not others
A single company-wide compliance standard cannot express any of that. A sub is either clear for this project or they are not.
Coverage limits
Each-occurrence, general aggregate and personal and advertising injury limits are compared numerically against the project’s minimums, so a limit that falls short by a factor of two is a finding rather than something to catch by eye at the end of a long day.
Additional insured requirements
Verisova reports what the certificate indicates about additional insured status, including the wording in the description of operations. Being named as certificate holder is not the same thing, and an indication on a certificate is not the same as the underlying endorsement — the additional insured guide covers when to ask for the endorsement itself, including why a certificate citing CG 20 10 alone does not evidence completed operations cover. The other two requirements that travel in the same contract clause have their own guides: waiver of subrogation and primary and non-contributory.
Coverage That Expires Mid-Project
A twelve-month policy and an eighteen-month schedule mean at least one renewal during the job, for every sub on it. Verisova checks each certificate’s expiration date against both today and the project’s own end date, which separates coverage that has already lapsed from coverage that will lapse before the scope is complete.
The second case is the one that matters on a long job, and it is invisible to any process that only asks whether a certificate is current. See what to do when a contractor’s COI expires for the review to run on the replacement.
Centralized Review, Less Spreadsheet
Each project shows the subs assigned to it, which are ready, which need attention and which have expired coverage, with a risk score built from those findings and the reasoning shown. The certificate list itself can be searched, filtered by status and sorted.
What that replaces is the tracking spreadsheet — the tab per project, the expiration column that is accurate as of whenever somebody last updated it. Note that Verisova surfaces expiring coverage in the app rather than emailing reminders, so the calendar reminder may still earn its place. More on the ongoing side in COI tracking software.
Where the limits are
Try It on One Certificate
Take the next subcontractor certificate that lands, record what the project requires, and see what the comparison says. Two reviews are free and no card is needed — pricing covers what happens after that.
For the field-by-field detail, see how to verify a certificate of insurance and the ACORD 25 verification guide.