The COI tracking spreadsheet, and what it misses

Most small general contractors track certificates of insurance in a spreadsheet, and for a while that is exactly the right call. It is free, you already know how to use it, and it beats a folder of PDFs and a good memory.

Here is a template you can use today. No email required — it downloads directly.

How to use it

1. One row per subcontractor per coverage type. A sub with general liability and workers' comp gets two rows, because the two policies expire on different days and the earlier one is the one that matters.
2. Fill in the Expiration column from the ACORD 25. Everything in Days left and Status computes from it.
3. Sort or filter by Status. Deal with EXPIRED first, then MISSING, then EXPIRING.

If you are not sure which date on the certificate to use, or what the form is telling you, what a certificate of insurance actually proves walks through the ACORD 25 field by field.

Where the spreadsheet stops working

This is worth being straight about, because the answer is not "immediately" and it is not "never". A spreadsheet handles the recording problem completely. What it cannot do is the remembering and the chasing, and those are where coverage actually lapses.

1. It only tells you things when you open it

The status column is correct every day. It is only useful on the days you look. Coverage does not lapse because a contractor did not know the date — it lapses because nobody opened the file in March.

2. Nothing chases the subcontractor

Finding out that Vega Plumbing expired last week is maybe five percent of the work. The other ninety-five is emailing Luis, waiting, emailing again, catching him on site, waiting for his agent to send the certificate, then filing it. A spreadsheet does not help with any of that, and it is the part that consumes actual hours.

3. The documents live somewhere else

The spreadsheet holds dates; the PDFs sit in email, or a Dropbox folder, or a filing cabinet. When a GC or an insurer asks for proof, you are searching two places and hoping the file you find is the current one.

4. It quietly goes stale

A row is only as good as the last time somebody typed in it. There is no way to tell, looking at the sheet, whether a 2027 expiration date reflects a certificate you actually hold or one somebody promised to send you in January.

5. It does not survive growth or handover

At five subs a spreadsheet is fine. At twenty-five, across three jobs, with a bookkeeper who also edits it, you get two versions and no history of who changed what.

When to stop using a spreadsheet

Honestly: keep using it while all of these are true.

• You have fewer than about ten subcontractors.
• You look at the file at least monthly, reliably.
• Your subs generally send renewals without being asked twice.
• Nobody else needs to see or edit it.

When two or more of those stop being true, the failure is not that your spreadsheet is wrong. It is that being right in a file nobody opened does not keep an uninsured subcontractor off your job.

What a tool adds

Only two things really, but they are the two the spreadsheet cannot do: it watches the dates without being opened, and it emails the subcontractor a link to upload the new certificate — which is the step that actually closes the loop. The document and the date then live in the same place.

That is what SubCover does, and it is free for five subcontractors, which is roughly the point where a spreadsheet is still fine anyway. If you would rather keep the sheet, the template above is genuinely yours — no email wall, no expiry.