How are you tracking vendor insurance (COI) expirations?

Question

Question for anyone managing more than a handful of doors. How do you keep track of when your vendors' certificates of insurance expire?

I talk to a lot of property managers about their paperwork, and this one comes up more than I expected. The COI comes in as an email attachment when you first onboard the vendor, gets saved somewhere, and nobody looks at it again. Then there's a claim and you find out the plumber's coverage lapsed two months ago.

What I've seen people do:

1. A spreadsheet with vendor, policy and expiry date. Works great for about a month, then nobody updates it.

2. Calendar reminders set when the COI arrives. Better, but it depends on one person remembering to set them, and it breaks when that person leaves.

3. Making it the vendor's problem. No current COI on file, no work order and no payment. The firms that do this seem to have the fewest gaps, because the vendor chases it instead of you.

4. Automating it. Have the COIs filed and the expiry dates pulled out of the PDFs so you can just ask which ones expire in the next 60 days. Full disclosure, this is what I work on, so I'm biased. But even with a tool, #3 is still the policy that does the heavy lifting.

Curious what's actually working for people here. Does your PM software handle this well, or is it still a spreadsheet? And do you hold payments when a COI lapses?

Rosina Persaud · Answer

We keep it simple, and the rule does the work: no current COI on file, no work order and no payment. We collect the COI when a vendor is onboarded, before their first small paid job — a faucet swap or a lock change — and we log the expiry date in one vendor sheet with the trade, the areas they cover, and their rate. The sheet gets a 30-day and a 14-day reminder, and when it lapses the vendor chases the renewal, not us, because they cannot get the next job without it. At 236 doors that is the only version that holds up; a spreadsheet nobody updates is the same as no system. The policy matters more than the tool. Do you hold payment when a COI lapses, or just stop sending work?

Jeanette Prestia · Answer

Rosina, I'd do both, but only if it's written down before the job starts. Put it in the vendor agreement or the work order that payment goes out once a current COI is on file. Then holding a check isn't a fight, it's just the rule they already signed.

At my day job at a car dealership I chase bankers for their renewed licenses, and it works the same way. When the paperwork is tied to getting paid, it shows up fast. When it's just a reminder, it sits.

Bigyan Karki · Answer

@Chris Seveney the 30-day email is a smart touch, especially sending it to the vendor too. That puts the chasing on them instead of you.

Which PM software are you using that handles it? I hear a lot of people say theirs technically has a COI field but nobody fills it in, so curious which ones actually make it stick.

Chris Seveney · Answer

Pm software we use handles it and for construction arm software also handles it:

For smaller people put it on a spreadsheet and have Claude create a script for your spreadsheet to send you an email or them an email 30 days before it expires

How are you tracking vendor insurance (COI) expirations?

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