Best Certificate of Insurance Tracking Software
Automate Your COI Tracking
There’s no more need to worry about stacks of certificates cluttering up your office or hours of frustrating phone calls and emails to chase down certificates. myCOI Central provides your company with a solution to automate your insurance certificate requests, collection, and compliance resolution, while also giving your team a single, centralized repository to view compliance.
Protect Your Business From Costly Claims
Ask your CFO or Risk Manager just how much claims and lawsuits can cost your business. If you are collecting certificates just to confirm they were received, you have no guarantee that your requirements are being met. myCOI Central is built on a foundation of insurance industry logic to ensure you remain protected with the appropriate coverage.
For Agents & Brokers
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ACORD Certificate of Insurance Sample
If you’re trying to understand what a certificate of insurance does, looking at an ACORD certificate of insurance sample is one of the best places to start. The nonprofit ACORD—the Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development—publishes and maintains an extensive list of standardized forms. Using a list of ACORD forms makes it easy to ensure that you’re using forms that the larger insurance industry will recognize.
A certificate of insurance is issued by an agent or insurer and certifies that the named insured carries the protections and coverage listed at the time the certificate was issued. That’s the most simple form of a certificate of insurance explained.
If you’re a business that receives certificates of insurance (COIs) from the contractors or vendors you hire, you already know the critical need you have for collecting, tracking, and verifying them. Your business has rules about the coverages and endorsements it requires, as well as the limitations or exclusions it will not. All of that may be discoverable on a COI, or possibly not.
ACORD Insurance Forms
As your business continues to grow, you will also accumulate a wide variety of insurance policies. Therefore, you need to make sure that you stay prepared to meet the insurance certificate needs of multiple clients. One means of staying organized is to take a look at a blank ACORD form from the ACORD insurance forms list, which will include a sample ACORD 25 as well as the ACORD 25 instructions.
The ACORD 25 is the standard general liability insurance certificate, but it can serve a lot of needs.
Keep in mind that this is not something you need to do alone or entirely by hand. In fact, there are advanced software programs that are designed specifically to help you keep these forms in the correct order, as well as up to date, secure, and accessible. This way, you can be alerted automatically whenever a policy is about to expire, and choose to renew it if that is the right decision for your company.
Also make sure you’re securing certificates from your agent or agency. Because of the simplicity and universality of the ACORD form insurance agents typically use, are always familiar with it, and will work with you to ensure you’re meeting—and proving, with your certificates—that you have the coverage you need.
How To Get ACORD Insurance Certificate
Once you get the insurance and other forms you need, you also need to make sure that you get an insurance certificate for your clients who may request this. Consider this certificate as proof that your company has the protection it claims to have. Understanding how to get an ACORD certificate of insurance can help you mitigate questions from other companies who may need to request the form from you.
If you are still wondering how to get a certificate of insurance, or maybe how to get ACORD insurance certificate, then the first thing you may do is take a look at an ACORD certificate of insurance sample. You may also get a certificate of insurance online from your agent or broker.
The key to understanding your ACORD certificate of insurance is to know what should be included on your form. Take the time to locate a free fillable ACORD 25 form; these ACORD form samples, including the ACORD 25 sample, make it easy to see what’s included. You need to make sure your name, as well as the name of your company, are all included. You also need to make sure that the policy number and carrier NAIC number are included as well. The type of insurance protection, the effective date, and the limits of the insurance protection should also be clear and prominent on this important document.
If you have questions or concerns about what should be included on this document, then it is certainly worth reaching out to professionals who can help you.
ACORD Certificate Of Insurance Verification
Choosing the right form makes ensuring your vendors and contractors are in compliance much easier. With an ACORD certificate of insurance verification becomes a matter of confirming each of the listed values matches what your requirements are.
Easy, right? Not exactly. The easy and unquestioned access of anyone to free ACORD 25 fillable forms means that you may need to also verify the coverage with the insurer. Knowing how to verify a certificate of insurance with the issuing agent is a handy skill for risk team members or compliance admins to have.
Sometimes it’s not just coverage you have to verify. If you’ve held this certificate for a while, you may want to verify that the certificate is still valid. Coverage expires, or gets modified, and sometimes new certificates with accurate coverage are not provided to you.
Blanket Additional Insured Wording On Certificate Of Insurance
Investopedia defines blanket additional insured wording on certificate of insurance as “an insurance policy endorsement that automatically provides coverage to any party to which the named insured is contractually required to provide coverage. A blanket additional insured endorsement is most commonly found in liability insurance policies, though it is typically not a feature of the policy language.” Quite often, people choose blanket endorsements because they work with so many companies that securing individual endorsements is too time and effort-consuming to be practical.
Like a named additional insured endorsement, a blanket additional insured endorsement extends the insured’s policy protection to another party. However, many insurers stipulate additional requirements for entities to qualify for blanket endorsement, the most common of which is that the two parties have a business contract in place.
If you want to see what these endorsements look like, search online for sample additional insured wording for a blanket endorsement. You should be able to find quite a few PDFs for your state or industry to give you a good general direction of what to look for.
Deciding whether your business can accept a blanket endorsement vs specific endorsements is a question for your counsel or your risk management group. There are pros and cons to each, and in many cases certificate holders often stipulate that a specific endorsement is required, so that there’s no danger of claim denial.
Sample Certificate Of Insurance With Additional Insured
IRMI—the International Risk Management Institute—defines an additional insured as “a person or organization not automatically included as an insured under an insurance policy who is included or added as an insured under the policy at the request of the named insured.” That translates quite often as “I need to extend the coverage I purchase from my insurer to the third-party hiring me to do some work.”
A sample of additional insured endorsements is relatively easy to find online. A quick search will turn up a plethora of certificate of insurance additional insured samples. What you’re going to see is a standard certificate of insurance, but with the addition of the additional insured. Be careful that you don’t mistake a sample certificate of insurance with additional insured for an example of the kind of coverage you need to secure for your business; that’s a conversation you need to have with your insurer, not something you get from a PDF.
If you’re on the other side of this conversation, as a business requesting additional insured status on the certificates of insurance you collect from your third parties, you already know the necessity of such endorsements. Transferring additional risk incurred by your third parties back to those third parties is a critical part of risk management, and few companies can afford to carry the risk of damaging claims on their own books.
Also, always remember what means what when it comes to certificates of insurance and additional insureds. There’s a lot of difference between being the insurance certificate holder vs additional insured.
Certificate Of Insurance Additional Insured Wording
There is a great deal of importance in the certificate of insurance additional insured wording, so much so that it is often the deciding factor between whether a company is held liable for a specific claim or not.
Let’s look at this example IRMI provides:
A project owner may enter into a contract with a general contractor that obligates the general contractor and all subcontractors to name the owner as an additional insured on their general liability policies. Even if the general contractor, in turn, requires the subcontractors to name the owner as an additional insured and the subcontractors procure policies containing blanket additional insured endorsements, it is not always clear that the subcontractor’s insurer will be obligated to provide additional insured coverage to the owner due to the absence of a direct contract between those parties.
There is a growing distance between being listed as additional insured and being endorsed as an additional insured, and states and courts have been ruling on this difference in different ways. You need to make sure your counsel or your risk management team clearly understands the precedents in your state, if you receive additional insured wording on certificate of insurance.
And if you’re a company that often receives requests for additional insured endorsement wording, make sure your requestors are making what they require very clear, because again: there is a difference between being listed as an additional insured and being endorsed as one. You’ll want to work with your insurer to make sure you understand the costs and impacts of each of those scenarios, so you know what your business can accept during the negotiation process.