How general contractors track insurance

What "tracking insurance" actually means for a GC

When a general contractor talks about tracking insurance, they almost always mean tracking their subcontractors’ insurance. Every sub you hire is supposed to carry general liability and workers’ compensation coverage, name your company as an additional insured, and often add a waiver of subrogation and primary and non-contributory wording—the full subcontractor insurance requirements you set before anyone starts work. Tracking is how you confirm all of that is real and stays real for the length of the job.

The proof lives on a certificate of insurance—almost always an ACORD 25 form. But a certificate is only accurate the day it’s issued. A sub who was fully covered at kickoff can have a cancelled policy three months in. So the real work isn’t collecting one PDF; it’s collecting the right PDF from every sub, verifying the fields against your requirements, and watching every expiration date until the work is done. This guide surveys the four approaches GCs use to do that—and where each one breaks.

Method 1: Spreadsheets and email

This is where nearly every GC starts. Someone in the office keeps a spreadsheet with a row per sub—insurer, limits, expiration date—and chases certificates over email. It costs nothing, everyone already knows how to use it, and for a handful of subs on a single job it genuinely works.

The problem is that a spreadsheet is a passive record. It can’t read an ACORD 25, so someone re-keys every field by hand and re-keys it again at each renewal. It can’t tell whether the additional insured endorsement is actually attached or just checked off in a box. And it will never warn you that a policy expired last Tuesday—you find out during an audit or, worse, after a loss. Industry practitioners consistently put the breaking point somewhere around 15 to 50 active subcontractors: manageable with five, unreliable at fifty.

• Works when: you run a handful of subs on one or two jobs and renewal dates are stable.
• Breaks when: sub count climbs, projects overlap, or endorsements have to be verified—not just logged.

For a step-by-step system that makes the manual approach as reliable as it can be, see how to track certificates of insurance and the COI tracking checklist.

Method 2: Offloading to your insurance broker or agent

Some GCs hand the job to their broker: forward the certificates, and the agency reviews them. It’s appealing because your broker already understands coverage, and the certificate’s issuing agent is the authoritative source for questions about exclusions and endorsements.

But it has real limits. Certificate review is rarely a broker’s core business, so it’s often a side task handled slowly and without a system you can see. You typically don’t get a live compliance dashboard, self-serve upload links for subs, or automated expiration alerts on your own timeline—you get a periodic email. And the accountability stays fuzzy: if a lapse slips through, it’s your project that’s exposed regardless of who was "watching." A broker is a good backstop for interpreting tricky coverage questions, but it’s a weak system of record for tracking dozens of subs at scale.

Method 3: Generic document or project-management software

Plenty of GCs already run a project-management or document platform—Procore, a shared drive, a folder structure—and try to fold COIs into it. Certificates get uploaded per project, and the tool becomes a filing cabinet. That’s a real upgrade over scattered email attachments: everything is in one searchable place.

The catch is that these tools store certificates; they don’t understand them. A shared drive doesn’t know an ACORD 25 from an invoice, can’t grade a certificate against your limits, and won’t flag a missing waiver of subrogation. Some construction platforms add basic expiration reminders, but few read endorsements or check compliance field by field. You still do the insurance thinking yourself—the software just holds the paper.

Method 4: Dedicated COI tracking software

Purpose-built COI tracking software closes the gaps the other methods leave open. It collects certificates directly from subs, reads the ACORD 25, checks the specific fields that matter against your requirements, and monitors every expiration automatically. Within this category there are two distinct models worth understanding.

Managed and enterprise platforms

Tools like myCOI and TrustLayer often pair software with a managed-service layer—a team that chases non-compliant subs on your behalf. That outreach is genuinely useful for large risk departments, but it comes with per-vendor pricing (frequently in the $10–$30 range), implementation projects, and contracts. For a mid-size GC it can be more platform than the problem requires.

Self-serve platforms

The other model is self-serve software you set up yourself in an afternoon. Wardly sits here: you send each sub a no-login upload link, Wardly reads the ACORD 25 and grades every certificate A–F against your requirements—including additional insured, waiver of subrogation, and primary and non-contributory—and it watches every expiration date for you. It’s free forever for unlimited subs, which removes the per-vendor math entirely.

The four methods, side by side

Here’s how the approaches stack up on the dimensions GCs care about most—cost, how much is automated, whether you get expiration alerts, and how far each scales.

For deeper comparisons, see Excel vs. COI tracking software, the spreadsheet vs. software breakdown, or the full software comparison.