A folder and a calendar, or something that reads the certificate
Most contractors start here, and for a while it is genuinely enough. This is what stops being true as the list grows.
The setup is familiar because almost everyone has run it. A certificate arrives by email, you drag the PDF into a folder on the shared drive, and you put a reminder in the calendar for the month it expires. Nothing about that is careless — it is the obvious thing to do, it costs nothing, and on a job with four subcontractors it works. What follows is not an argument that it is wrong. It is a description of the two specific places it stops holding, so you can tell whether you are there yet.
What the folder actually knows
With a folder and a calendar
A folder knows a filename and a modified date. It does not know that the document inside is a certificate, that the general liability limit is $1,000,000, or that the policy runs out in June — unless somebody typed that into the filename. Which means the only searchable facts about your compliance are the ones a person remembered to write down twice.
With Sealinn
Sealinn reads the fields off the ACORD 25 — carriers, policy numbers, limits, dates — and stores them as values you can sort and filter. The document is still there; what changes is that the facts inside it are now facts the system holds rather than facts you remember.
What the calendar entry stops being true about
With a folder and a calendar
The reminder is a date a person typed once. When the sub sends a renewal in March for a policy that was expiring in June, the June entry is still sitting there and is now wrong — and nobody goes back to move it. Over a couple of renewal cycles the calendar drifts away from the documents it was supposed to be tracking, quietly, with no error anywhere.
With Sealinn
The expiry comes off the document, so it changes when the document does. Upload a renewal and the countdown moves with it; there is no second place holding a date that has to be corrected by hand.
Who actually does the chasing
With a folder and a calendar
The reminder fires at you. Then you open the email you sent last year, change the name and the date, and send it again — and again in two weeks when there is no reply. The calendar told you to do the work; it did not do any of it.
With Sealinn
Reminders go to the subcontractor, 90, 60, 30 and 7 days before expiry, and keep going until something arrives. You are told when it has not worked, rather than told to start.
Telling which one is current
With a folder and a calendar
Three files: ABC-COI.pdf, ABC-COI-2.pdf, ABC COI final.pdf. One of them is the policy in force today and the other two are last year's. There is nothing in a folder that distinguishes them except the modified date, which is when somebody saved a file rather than when the coverage started.
With Sealinn
One document per requirement is current at a time, and the ones it replaced stay on the record as history rather than as clutter. The current one is the one the compliance status is computed from.
What it proves a year later
With a folder and a calendar
A folder proves a file existed. It does not show when you accepted it, who decided it was acceptable, or what your requirement was on the day the crew started — which is exactly the sequence you are asked to reconstruct after something goes wrong. What an audit actually asks for is a different shape from what a folder keeps.
With Sealinn
Every approval, override and rejection is written to a log the application has no permission to change or delete, and it exports to PDF, Excel or CSV. The record is a by-product of doing the work rather than something assembled afterwards.
What it costs
With a folder and a calendar
Nothing, in software. The cost is entirely your minutes — the drag into the folder, the calendar entry, the chase email, the second chase email, and the ten minutes finding the current file when somebody asks. The arithmetic is worth doing honestly rather than assuming it is free because there is no invoice.
With Sealinn
Free for up to 10 subcontractors, and priced by how many you track after that. The pricing is on the page rather than in a proposal.
When a folder and a calendar is still the right answer
Keep the folder if you have a handful of subcontractors on one job and you are on site most days. At that size you genuinely do remember whose certificate is thin, the calendar entry is still accurate because nothing has renewed yet, and buying software to manage four PDFs would be a worse decision than not buying it. The point at which it stops working is not a number of subcontractors — it is the first time you cannot answer is this sub covered right now without opening the folder to check. That question arriving at the gate on a Friday is the signal, and it tends to arrive before anyone expects it. If you have already moved as far as a tracking sheet, that is a different comparison and the answer there is often that the sheet is still fine.
Keep the folder. Stop being the calendar.
Sealinn is free for up to 10 subcontractors, no card. The documents stay yours; the remembering stops being your job.