BuildingConnected insurance tracking

What BuildingConnected is—and where TradeTapp fits

BuildingConnected is Autodesk’s bid management platform. General contractors use it to build bid packages, invite subcontractors from a large North American network (BuildingConnected Pro), and level the proposals that come back; subcontractors track invitations through Bid Board Pro. Its core job is preconstruction—getting the right trade partners into the right bids.

TradeTapp is the risk side of that same family. It is BuildingConnected’s subcontractor prequalification product, and it is where anything resembling insurance review lives. TradeTapp collects a subcontractor’s business information, financial statements, safety statistics, references, and insurance data, then turns that into a risk picture your estimating and risk teams can act on. When people search for "BuildingConnected insurance tracking," what they are usually describing is TradeTapp’s prequalification workflow.

What TradeTapp actually does for insurance and risk

TradeTapp’s strength is bid-stage and onboarding risk analysis. Subcontractors submit information through a standardized online questionnaire, and TradeTapp analyzes it with financial and safety benchmarks to produce a risk evaluation. In practice that covers:

• Financial risk scoring — TradeTapp ingests financial statements and generates a risk evaluation score, comparing a subcontractor’s reported backlog against a recommended capacity and financial benchmarking percentiles.
• Recommended capacity limits — it calculates a recommended Single Project Capacity and Aggregate Total Capacity from the sub’s financials, so you can size how much work to award them.
• Safety review — EMR (Experience Modification Rate) letters and safety statistics factor into the qualification.
• Insurance profile review — the qualification captures a subcontractor’s insurance data so you can confirm coverage lines and limits meet your program before you award work.
• Custom questionnaires and internal limits — GCs personalize the application, set internal limits and financial-ratio rules, and route approvals.

That insurance review matters at onboarding, especially for contractors running a subcontractor default insurance (SDI) program, where qualifying a sub’s financial and insurance profile up front is part of managing default exposure. TradeTapp also syncs qualification status back to BuildingConnected Pro so estimators see who is qualified before they award.

Prequalification is not ongoing COI tracking

Here is the distinction that trips up a lot of contractors. Reviewing a subcontractor’s insurance profile during prequalification is a point-in-time check. It tells you the sub carried acceptable coverage when they applied. It does not, on its own, keep collecting a fresh certificate of insurance on every project, verify the specific endorsements your subcontract requires, and watch each policy’s expiration date for the entire time that sub is on your site.

Ongoing certificate-of-insurance tracking is a different discipline. It means, for each active project and each active sub:

1. Collecting the current ACORD 25 from every subcontractor working under you.
2. Verifying general liability limits, auto, workers’ comp, and umbrella meet your subcontract minimums.
3. Confirming endorsements—additional insured, waiver of subrogation, primary and non-contributory—are actually in place, not just requested.
4. Monitoring every effective and expiration date so you can chase a renewal before coverage lapses mid-project.

A certificate is only accurate the day it’s issued. A subcontractor who was fully insured when they cleared prequalification can have a cancelled or downgraded policy months later—while they’re still on your job. Prequalification tools are not built to catch that; continuous COI tracking is. For a broader view of where this sits inside Autodesk’s ecosystem, see our companion guide on Autodesk Construction Cloud COI tracking.

BuildingConnected/TradeTapp vs. ongoing COI tracking, side by side

Both jobs are legitimate and they complement each other. The table below maps what bid-stage prequalification covers, what ongoing certificate tracking covers, and where a dedicated tracker fills the gap.

How the two fit together on a real project

The clean way to think about it is a timeline. Prequalification lives at the front; certificate tracking runs the whole length of the job.

• Preconstruction: TradeTapp qualifies the sub—financials, safety, insurance profile—and BuildingConnected Pro shows estimators who is cleared to bid.
• Award & onboarding: you confirm the sub’s coverage lines and limits meet your subcontract before signing.
• Active project: you need a current, endorsement-correct ACORD 25 on file for every sub, refreshed at each renewal—this is where a dedicated COI tracker takes over.
• Close-out: coverage should stay valid through completion and into any required tail period.

None of this makes BuildingConnected or TradeTapp "wrong"—they are strong at the job they were built for. The point is simply that the front-end risk score and the ongoing certificate file are different artifacts, and relying on the first to do the second is how expired COIs slip through. If you already track subcontractor requirements, our guide on subcontractor insurance requirements covers what each certificate should actually show.

Filling the ongoing-tracking gap

If you use BuildingConnected and TradeTapp for prequalification, the missing piece is a system that lives on your active projects and never stops watching expirations. That is exactly what dedicated COI tracking software does: it sends subcontractors a no-login upload link, reads the ACORD 25, grades each certificate A–F against your requirements, and tracks every expiration date continuously so nothing lapses mid-project.

It’s not an either/or. Keep TradeTapp for bid-stage financial and insurance risk; add a continuous tracker for the certificate lifecycle. See how the options stack up in the best COI tracking software comparison, the side-by-side compare page, or the overview of COI tracking for general contractors.