A contractor arrives to service a line, replace a roof section or work on plant power. Someone has their certificate of insurance. Whether that certificate satisfies the requirements your procurement team wrote into the contract is a different question, and it is usually answered by the fact that the document exists.
Verisova compares the certificate against the requirements you have recorded, before the contractor is onsite — so the check is a comparison rather than a filing status.
Why This Is Harder at a Facility Than on a Building Site
A construction project has one owner requirement set, one schedule and a team whose job includes contractor administration. A working facility has none of those advantages:
- Contractors attend continuously rather than mobilising once, so there is no single point at which everything gets reviewed.
- Many are on standing service agreements, and their coverage has renewed several times since anyone looked at it.
- The person letting them through the gate is not the person who wrote the insurance requirements.
- Reactive work happens at short notice, which is precisely when a certificate check gets skipped.
- A shutdown compresses dozens of contractor engagements into a few days.
The result is not usually a missing certificate. It is a certificate on file that nobody has measured against anything.
Built for Facilities Like These
- Manufacturing plants with continuous or shift-based production
- Warehouses and distribution centres
- Industrial and process facilities
- Roofing, tile and building-products manufacturers
- Multi-site operations where each location engages its own contractors
The Contractors and Vendors Who Come Onsite
- Maintenance contractors on planned and reactive work
- Electrical contractors working on plant power and controls
- Mechanical, HVAC and refrigeration contractors
- Equipment vendors and service technicians attending under a service agreement
- Roofing, structural and building-fabric contractors
- Specialist trades brought in for shutdowns, turnarounds and installations
- Cleaning, waste, pest control and grounds contractors attending on a schedule
Standing service vendors deserve particular attention. A technician who has attended monthly for four years has had four renewals in that time, any of which could have changed carriers, limits or endorsements — and none of which prompted a review. Vendor insurance tracking covers that pattern specifically.
Supplier Insurance, Not Just Onsite Contractors
Manufacturing carries a second population the construction model does not: suppliers whose insurance requirements came out of a purchase order or a master supply agreement rather than out of a site induction. Hauliers delivering to the dock, equipment vendors commissioning a line, outsourced logistics, contract packers, waste handlers.
Manufacturing vendor compliance and supplier compliance programmes usually cover quality, delivery and safety thoroughly, and insurance by filing cabinet. Those requirements were written by procurement, the certificate arrives in a sourcing mailbox, and the comparison between the two frequently never happens — the clause is in a contract repository and the document is in an inbox. Supplier insurance compliance covers that side of the problem, and vendor insurance requirements covers writing a requirement that can be checked at all.
Who Actually Does This
Contractor insurance review rarely belongs to one function at a facility. Verisova is built so that the check does not depend on which team happens to be holding it:
- Operations and maintenance
- Engaging the contractor and setting the date. Usually the team under the most pressure to let work proceed, and the one holding the certificate when the question is asked.
- EHS
- Owns who is permitted onsite. Contractor insurance sits next to the induction, the permit to work and the method statement as something to be checked before access is granted.
- Procurement
- Wrote the insurance requirements into the contract or purchase order. Needs to know whether what arrived actually matches what was required.
- Risk and finance
- Needs the record afterwards: what was required, what was provided, what was compared and when.
Whoever uploads the certificate, the comparison is the same and the record is the same, so the review does not vary with who ran it.
Checking Before Work Starts
Record what the work requires
Requirements are recorded per project — which at a facility usually means per site, per area, or per package of work. Minimum each-occurrence and aggregate limits, the certificate holder the certificate should name, the endorsements the contract requires, and the dates the work runs between.
Upload the certificate and read the findings
Verisova extracts the coverage detail and compares it against those requirements. Findings name the field, the value read from the certificate and the requirement it missed — enough to go back to the vendor or their broker with something specific.
Keep watching the expiration dates
Expiration is checked against the current date and against the dates of the work, which separates coverage that has already lapsed from coverage that will lapse before a shutdown or a multi-week installation finishes. Expired and expiring coverage is surfaced in the app and in the dashboard counts; Verisova does not send reminder emails, so a facility relying on those today will want to know that before switching.
Having a COI Is Not the Same as Meeting Your Requirements
A certificate is a summary written by the contractor’s broker, on the day it was issued, without your requirements in front of them. It can be completely genuine and still show limits below what your contract asked for, coverage that ends before the work does, your organization as certificate holder where the contract required additional insured status, or no evidence of an endorsement that was mandatory.
Those only become visible when something compares the document against a stated requirement. The contractor insurance tracking page follows that comparison through the whole workflow.
What Verisova does not do
Start With One Contractor
Take the certificate for the next contractor due onsite, record what that work requires, and see what the comparison says. Two COI Reviews are free, with no card — pricing covers the plans beyond that.
For the review in full, see COI verification software, or the COI compliance checklist if you would rather run it by hand first. If you run several plants, warehouses or distribution centres rather than one, COI tracking across facilities covers the multi-site version.