Best Certificate of Insurance Tracking Software
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.
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.
For Agents & Brokers
Win business and boost retention by providing agency branded, industry leading insurance tracking software to your insureds. Offer software only or add on your own compliance review services.
What Are The Benefits of COI Software?
Certificate Of Insurance PDF
A certificate of insurance PDF can be a very useful tool, in several parts of your risk management business. As teaching aids, when you add new staff, a blank form is good to have so you can illustrate each of the fields and demonstrate what information goes where. Getting a firm understanding of the basics of a form can pay dividends down the road.
Consider the instance of a fake business insurance certificate. Knowing what information is expected to be found in each cell of the form can help a risk manager identify what’s out of place. This may seem like a far-fetched idea, but it has underpinnings in basic physiology: our eyes and brain coordinate to see things that are out of place. Think about how many times you’ve walked into a room and thought “something’s not right,” before realizing what the difference was. It’s the same effect.
Looking at blank forms can also teach new hires to recognize the differences between forms at a glance. An ACORD certificate of property insurance is visually different from an ACORD 25, for example.
Let’s take a look at more of the differences between forms and uses, below.
ACORD Certificate Of Insurance Sample
It may be helpful to take a look at a blank ACORD form, or other sample COI form. This might also include a sample certificate of insurance with additional insured information.
There are a lot of boxes out on this form. Whether you’re reviewing a certificate issued by your agent or broker you will want to confirm the following:
- You need to make sure your general liability insurance is listed. This typically includes the per occurrence limit and the aggregate limits of the policy.
- You also need to confirm the policy number. This includes the policy effective date and the policy expiration date.
- If you have automobile liability insurance, you need to include this as well. Again, make sure you confirmed the policy number, effective date, and expiration date.
- If you have workers’ compensation and employers t liability insurance, you should include all of this information as well. This includes the policy number, effective date, and expiration date.
- You may also have an umbrella or excess insurance policy. An umbrella or excess policy is a policy that kicks in if you exceed the maximum liability on some or all of the underlying insurance policies.
If you have questions about how an ACORD insurance form should be filled out properly, you may want to take a look at an ACORD form sample for help.
Sample ACORD 25
As you are looking at your ACORD certificate of insurance form sample, and then double-checking your own actual certificate, it is important to make sure there are no mistakes. If you’re providing this certificate to a hiring entity, they’re going to verify your coverage. If there are discrepancies, that could slow down when you begin work or even delay the project.
Think of it this way: in many states, you’re required to carry a certificate of car insurance sample—well, not a sample, the little card your car insurance agent gives you is the actual certificate—in case you get pulled over, to prove you’re covered in case of an accident. Companies have to do the same check, except the insurance requirements for businesses when dealing with other businesses are far more complex.
If you’re learning how to read certificates of insurance, a sample ACORD 25 is a good place to start. It is the most common general liability certificate of insurance form.
On the ACORD 25 sample, there are a few common mistakes people make. One of the most common mistakes is getting policy numbers confused. Your auto, workers’ compensation, and general liability insurance policies may have different policy numbers. Make sure you pair the right policy number with the right type of insurance.
Furthermore, these policies may have different expiration dates. Do not assume they all have the same effective date and expiration date. If you do, you may end up assigning the wrong dates to the wrong policies. This will render your ACORD 25 form inaccurate. Double-check the policy effective dates and expiration dates before you provide the certificate to anyone. If you have questions about your insurance policies, reach out to your insurance provider for more information.
Certificate of Insurance Online
Answering the question of how to get certificates of insurance online depends entirely on who you are and what your role is in this certificate of insurance process, because it affects both sourcing and propriety.
Let’s first imagine that you’re a contractor, vendor, or other third-party who is being asked to provide a certificate of insurance before you can begin work. In this case, you want to start with your insurance agent or broker’s website. Many providers offer forms that allow you to request the correct certificate without having to make an appointment or make a phone call.
What you should not do, though, is start wondering how to get ACORD insurance certificates online yourself, so you can fill them out without your agent. Don’t do that. Never do that. Let your insurance agent or broker do that. It’s their job, they’re the experts.
If you’re a certificate holder (the person or entity who receives certificates of insurance) and you need to request updated certificates, you can also start at the insurer’s website, if you know which agent to check out. This can happen in some instances when a certificate holder needs a new or updated certificate because of discrepancies or questions.
Lastly, if you’re an insurer looking for form templates, or even sitting at your computer asking “how do I fill out an ACORD certificate of insurance,” check with your senior leadership or check online for resources. ACORD provides helpful instructions for agents and brokers about filling out their forms.
How To Verify A Certificate Of Insurance
Certificate of insurance compliance is the work a risk manager or compliance admin does to collect, verify and maintain the certificates of insurance provided to that company by its third parties: they are the experts who know how to verify a certificate of insurance for compliance.
Each certificate of insurance has to be checked, first and foremost to ensure that it claims all the necessary coverages, amounts, limits, and exclusions that your company requires of its contractors. Sure, there is general liability insurance mentioned, but does it protect to the same amount that you require?
Also, what assurances do you have that the contractor didn’t let the policy lapse the day after they handed you the COI? Are you verifying with insurance agents that these contractors still hold the policies and protections that their COI claims? Are there exclusions to the contractor’s protection that will mean you’re held responsible for risk that should properly rest with the contractor?
Remember that there are varied certificates of insurance requirements by state, and you need to be aware of them. Certificate of insurance best practices in every case remind you to check your state requirements, and we’d be remiss if we didn’t do the same.
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 wording. 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. A sample COI with additional insured is just meant to be an example of format.
ACORD Certificate Of Insurance Verification
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 issuing agent or broker. 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. Business insurance is a complicated business, and it pays dividends to learn all the skills you can.
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.
Regardless, knowing how to verify a certificate of insurance is a skill every compliance admin or risk manager needs to know.
Also, remember that of the offerings in ACORD insurance services, actually offering insurance is not one of them. We get a lot of random questions about things like “ACORD insurance reviews,” when people clearly mean a review of actual insurance coverage. That’s not a thing they do.