Having a contractor’s certificate of insurance on file and having a contractor whose insurance meets your requirements are two different states. Most tracking systems only tell you about the first one.
Verisova tracks contractor insurance against the requirements for the project the work is actually happening on — so the answer to “is this contractor cleared?” is a comparison rather than a filing status.
A COI on File Is Not the Same as Meeting Your Requirements
A certificate is a summary, issued by the contractor’s broker, of what their coverage was on the day it was written. It is evidence, and it is worth collecting. What it does not do is state whether that coverage satisfies your requirements — because it was not written with your requirements in front of it.
A certificate can be entirely genuine and still leave you short:
- The limits are real but lower than your contract requires.
- The coverage is in force today and expires six weeks before the work ends.
- Your organization is named as certificate holder, which is not the same as being an additional insured.
- A required endorsement is referenced nowhere on the document.
- The named insured is a related entity rather than the company you contracted with.
Each of those is only visible if something compares the certificate against a stated requirement. Collecting the document more reliably does not surface any of them.
The Workflow, Start to Finish
This is the path a single contractor takes through Verisova, from being engaged to being monitored:
Contractor
A contractor, subcontractor, vendor or onsite service provider is engaged for a particular piece of work, on a particular project, with particular insurance requirements attached to it.
COI received
Their broker issues a certificate of insurance. It arrives as a PDF, usually an ACORD 25, and is uploaded. The coverage details are read out of it and stored as a record you can query.
Insurance requirements checked
The extracted values are compared against the requirements recorded for the project the contractor is assigned to — limits, certificate holder, required endorsements and the dates the work runs between.
Discrepancies identified
Anything that does not line up becomes a finding that names the field, the value read from the certificate and the requirement it was measured against.
Review
The findings and the extracted values are kept against the contractor and the project, so the record says what was compared rather than only that it was approved.
Ongoing monitoring
Expiration status is recalculated against the current date and against the project timeline, so coverage that lapses after approval does not stay quietly approved.
The loop matters more than any single step. Verification without monitoring goes stale the first time a policy renews; monitoring without stated requirements only tells you a document exists.
Who You End Up Tracking
- Contractors engaged directly for a defined scope of work
- Subcontractors brought in by those contractors, each with their own coverage
- Vendors and suppliers whose contracts carry insurance requirements
- Onsite service providers — maintenance, cleaning, landscaping, equipment servicing — who are onsite regularly and easy to leave unreviewed
The last group is the one that tends to go unreviewed. A contractor mobilising for a major project gets scrutiny; the service vendor who has been coming every month for three years often does not, and their coverage has renewed twice since anyone looked — vendor insurance tracking is that pattern written out.
Subcontractor insurance is its own layer
A contractor you engaged directly is one relationship. The subcontractors they bring with them are another, each with their own policy, their own renewal date and their own gaps — and the requirements that apply to them usually flow down from the same contract that governs the main contractor. Subcontractor certificates are tracked the same way here: assigned to the project, compared against that project’s requirements, and given their own expiration status rather than inheriting the main contractor’s. If subcontractor certificates are most of your workload, COI software for general contractors is written around that case.
“Can you send proof of insurance?”
What comes back is almost always an ACORD 25 from the contractor’s broker. That document is proof that a certificate was issued describing coverage on a given date. It is not proof that the policy is in force today, it does not amend the policy, and an indication on it is not the endorsement behind it. Contractor insurance verification means comparing what the document says against what you required — not confirming that a document arrived.
What Gets Checked
- Project-specific insurance requirements, recorded per project rather than as one global standard
- Expiration dates, checked against today and against the project’s own start and end dates
- Coverage limits, compared numerically against the project minimums
- Additional insured requirements, as indicated on the certificate
- Required endorsements, and whether anything on the certificate evidences them
- The certificate holder, against the organization the project expects to see named
COI coverage gaps works through each of those as a worked example, with the requirement, the value on the certificate and the difference between them.
Requirements belong to the project, not the company
Verisova records insurance requirements per project, because that is where they actually differ. The same subcontractor can satisfy the requirements on one job and fall short on the next without anything about their policy changing — and a system with one global standard cannot represent that.
Expiration is a moving target
Policy periods and project timelines do not line up, so a contractor approved at mobilisation can have coverage that ends mid-scope. Expiration is checked against both the current date and the project’s dates, which separates “has lapsed” from “will lapse before this finishes”. See what to do when a contractor’s COI expires.
Keeping the Record
Every reviewed certificate keeps its extracted values, its status and its findings, tied to the contractor and the projects they are assigned to. That is what makes the question “why was this contractor approved in March?” answerable in October.
What this does not do
Where to Start
Start with one contractor and one project: upload the certificate, record what the project requires, and see what the comparison says. The COI compliance checklist is the same review written out by hand, if you would rather see the shape of it first.
For the review itself in more depth, see COI verification software. For keeping many certificates current, see COI tracking software.