Certificate of insurance management is a vital risk-mitigating activity. It ensures that each vendor, supplier, tenant, subcontractor, franchisee, and carrier complies with your property’s insurance requirements.

Unfortunately, traditional COI management can be a complicated and time-consuming process for property and risk managers. It requires manually collecting, reviewing and verifying COIs from everyone leasing or working on a property.

Thankfully COI tracking software has emerged to help property managers and risk managers eliminate errors, reduce paperwork and administrative costs, ensure compliance and accelerate the COI management process.

What is COI Tracking?

COI tracking is a proactive approach to compliance. It uses specialized processors that understand the complexities of insurance certificates and automates processes to ensure that all certificates are received, accurate and verified on time. 

Why is COI Tracking Important 

COI tracking is critical to risk management for any property or risk management team. It helps protect your company against potential underinsured claims, expensive litigation, and failed audits. 

For example, if your insurers perform a premium audit and your company doesn’t have proof that your insureds maintain their own insurance, your premium insurance cost goes up. 

A proper COI tracking process or system can avoid millions of dollars in damage claims.

5 Ways Automation is Vital to COI Compliance

1. Reduces Costly Errors

According to Ventana Research, 35% of users said data errors are common in the most crucial spreadsheets they use at work. Relying on your property manager or risk manager to manually record critical COI data into an Excel spreadsheet or to compare it against your risk requirements leads to expensive errors and omissions. This risk becomes significantly heightened if the parties responsible for updating your COI tracking spreadsheet are not experienced in COI management.

Any mistakes in COI management could result in coverage gaps, unidentified exposures and unforeseen liabilities like lost productivity and higher costs associated with managing compliance documents manually.  

COI tracking software is designed to scrutinize all documents and to ensure information is accurate and up-to-date and compliance regulations are met. 

2. Eliminates Expired & Missing Certificates

Suppose a tenant’s COI is expired, and the insurance liability has not been assessed. In that case, it becomes the responsibility of your property management firm to cover any damages or incidents that arise on their behalf. 

COI tracking software provides real-time visibility into which certificates are valid, expiring, or missing. In addition, you can set up alerts or email reminders to notify your property or risk management team to review and renew certificates of insurance before they expire and source missing certificates to ensure your property is always fully compliant and protected. 

3. Enhances Insight & Streamlines Compliance Reporting

COI tracking software gives you a real-time snapshot of your portfolio risk exposure at any given time instead of waiting on monthly, quarterly, or yearly reports. You can gain immediate visibility into the COI status of all your vendors, suppliers, and tenants, quickly identify compliance issues and take immediate action by sending requests for policy updates and renewals.

Moreover, using a centralized platform to manage the COI lifecycle considerably decreases the time and effort needed to produce comprehensive documentation for audit or compliance checks.

4. Increases COI Response Rates

If the initial COI collection or renewal process is not timely enough, or you do not receive COIs when you request them, your company can be in a vulnerable position. 

With COI tracking, you can create and send insureds emails and alerts with clear and simplified instructions on what is required and links to upload their certificates online.

This streamlined communication and document exchange process leads to a more positive experience for vendors and tenants, increased certificate response rates, timely uploads, and increased compliance.

5. Improves Data Security

With a growing number of regulators calling for organizations to “take reasonable steps to prevent regulatory breaches from occurring,” businesses need to ensure their systems meet compliance standards. Unfortunately, tools like Excel lack enterprise-grade security and compliance standards. As a result, business-critical processes, especially those that require regulatory scrutiny, are better off outside legacy tools.

A secure-by-design COI tracking solution provides an extra security layer to protect sensitive data and ensure compliance.

Wrapping Up

Property and risk managers continue to manually collect and track COIs which is tedious and time-consuming and results in costly errors. Certificate of insurance tracking software can replace the Excel spreadsheets, paper printouts, Outlook reminders, and file cabinets that are wasting your time and resources and putting your organization at risk.

PremiseHQ’s COI tracking solution automates and simplifies the COI management lifecycle. You can manage your certificates, requirements, endorsements and insured relationships in a centralized location and streamline tedious, error-prone tasks with automated workflows to process, review, validate and maintain COIs. With advanced notifications, you can also send automatic real-time alerts on COI status, renewal dates and required actions to all your vendors, suppliers and tenants to avoid underinsured claims, costly litigation and failed audits.