Outsourcing certificate tracking, or doing it yourself
Handing the chasing to someone else buys back the hours and gives up the room to decide. Here is where that trade actually lands.
There is a real version of this service. You send over your subcontractor list, somebody else emails them for certificates, reads what comes back, tells you who is short, and keeps a file. If nobody in your office has time to do that, it is a fair thing to pay for. What this page does is name the parts of the arrangement that are easy to miss at the point of signing — because the questions below are much harder to raise a year in, with your compliance history sitting in somebody else's system.
Who decides what is acceptable
With an outsourced service
The service applies the rules you gave it at setup. Changing them — a higher limit on one job, an endorsement you now want by form number — usually means an email, a person, and a wait. The judgment calls in between get made by somebody who has never been on your site.
With Sealinn
You set the requirement once and change it yourself, in the moment. A project can carry its own limits and endorsements over the top of your defaults, and a rule you add applies to the next certificate that arrives rather than the next time somebody gets round to it.
How long a gap stays open
With an outsourced service
You learn what the service tells you, when it tells you. A weekly or monthly summary is common, and a sub whose policy lapsed the day after one is sent stays on your site for the rest of the cycle with nobody flagging it.
With Sealinn
Sealinn is the file, so there is no reporting cycle to wait for — the status is whatever is true right now. Reminders fire 90, 60, 30 and 7 days before expiry, so the chase starts long before anything lapses.
What happens on a Friday afternoon
With an outsourced service
A crew is at the gate, the certificate is in an inbox you cannot see, and the person who can tell you whether it is acceptable has gone home. The decision waits for their Monday, or you make it blind.
With Sealinn
You open the sub, look at what they sent, and decide. The document, the extracted values and what failed your requirements are all on one screen at whatever hour you need them.
Whose system holds your history
With an outsourced service
The record of who was covered, and when, is built and held by the provider. Ask what happens to it if you leave — in what format, how quickly, and whether it includes the certificate files themselves and not just a summary of them. Get the answer before you sign, not during the notice period.
With Sealinn
The data is yours to take at any time. You can download your certificates as a zip, organized by subcontractor, and the full audit log exports to PDF, Excel or CSV — including after you cancel. Our security page sets out how.
What the price is attached to
With an outsourced service
Pricing usually follows the labor: how many subs, how many documents, sometimes how many chases. You are buying somebody's time, which means the cost climbs with exactly the growth that made you need help. Ask what a busy year costs, not what this month costs.
With Sealinn
You are buying software, and the price is on the pricing page rather than in a proposal. What COI tracking costs sets out the arithmetic for either route, including the parts that are your time rather than an invoice.
Reading the certificate itself
With an outsourced service
A person reads the ACORD 25 and records what it says. That is the same job Sealinn does, done by someone who is good at it — and it is worth asking whether their notes travel with the file or stay in their system.
With Sealinn
Sealinn reads the fields off the certificate and scores its confidence in each one. Anything below 95% goes to a person before it is filed rather than through, and how that routing works is written out in full.
When outsourcing is the right call
Outsource when the constraint is genuinely time and nobody in the building is going to do this. A service that emails your subs, reads what comes back and tells you who is short is worth real money if the alternative is that it does not happen at all — and a GC running a hundred subs across several jobs with no office staff is exactly that case. The questions worth asking first are boring and specific: how quickly you hear about a lapse, who decides what is acceptable when your requirement is unusual, and how your history leaves if you do. That last one is the one to settle in writing before you sign — on our side what comes out and in what format is a page rather than a conversation, and it works the same after you cancel. If a spreadsheet is where you are today rather than a service, that is a different comparison and the answer there is often that the sheet is still fine. And if the arrangement on the table is a favor from your own agent rather than a paid scope, that one turns on different things.
Keep the decisions. Lose the chasing.
Sealinn is free for up to 10 subcontractors, no card. The reminders and the coverage checks run themselves; what to accept stays yours.