Your broker keeping an eye on it, or holding the record yourself
A good agent is worth keeping, and this is not an argument against one. It is about which parts of this job their position lets them do.
First, a distinction worth making out loud, because the two get run together. Asking your subcontractor's agent for an endorsement copy is the right move and this site recommends it on nearly every page — that person issued the certificate and can produce the document behind it. Asking your own broker to keep track of whether your subs are covered is a different arrangement with a different shape. Plenty of agents do it, often well and usually as a courtesy to keep the account. What follows is not about how well they do it. It is about the parts of the job their position does not reach, which are easy to miss precisely because the person is helpful.
What their file is built for
With your broker keeping an eye on it
Your broker's file exists to place and renew your insurance. What it holds is what an underwriter asked for — and a certificate they were copied on is a document that arrived, not a compliance record they were engaged to maintain. Their year is organized around your renewal date, not around thirty subcontractors' policy dates.
With Sealinn
The file exists for one purpose: to answer whether a given subcontractor is covered right now, against the requirement you set. Nothing in it is a by-product of a different job.
Who can actually compel a certificate
With your broker keeping an eye on it
Your broker has no contract with your subcontractors, so they have no standing to require anything from them. They can ask, and a polite request from an insurance professional often works — but the leverage is entirely yours, because it is your subcontract and your payment.
With Sealinn
The request goes out under your name with a link the sub can upload through, and 90, 60, 30 and 7 days before expiry. The leverage stays where it always was; only the asking is automated.
Where the requirement actually lives
With your broker keeping an eye on it
This is the structural one. What you require is written in your subcontract — the limits, the endorsements by form number, whether this particular job needs more than your standard. Your broker does not hold your subcontracts. They hold whatever you told them once, which means a project-specific requirement is only checked if you remembered to mention it.
With Sealinn
The requirement is a setting, and a project can carry its own on top of your defaults. A certificate is measured against the rule that applies to that job, without anyone needing to recall what the contract said.
When you find out
With your broker keeping an eye on it
You ask, and you find out when they get back to you — which is business hours, and depends on how their week is going. That is a perfectly reasonable service level for a favor. It is a poor one for a crew standing at the gate on a Friday afternoon.
With Sealinn
You look. The status is whatever is true at that moment, on your screen, at whatever hour you are asking the question.
What survives the relationship
With your broker keeping an eye on it
The account manager who knows your subs moves on, or you move your insurance. What comes with you is the policies — the working knowledge of which of your subcontractors runs thin on completed operations usually does not, because it was never written down anywhere you can read.
With Sealinn
The history is yours and it is exportable, PDF, Excel or CSV — including after you cancel. Changing brokers has no effect on it, because it was never held anywhere but here.
What it proves afterwards
With your broker keeping an eye on it
If a claim or an audit asks who was covered on the day work started, the answer is a person's recollection plus whatever emails survive. That is not nothing — but reconstructing it is a project, and it happens at the worst possible time. What an audit actually asks for is more specific than most people expect.
With Sealinn
Every approval and override is written to a log the application cannot change or delete, with who decided and when. Producing it is an export rather than an investigation.
When leaving it with your broker is genuinely enough
If you run a handful of subcontractors and you have an agent who has genuinely offered to watch them, keep it — that is a good relationship and it is doing real work. The thing to be clear about is what you have agreed to: whether they are actively chasing renewals or simply filing what gets copied to them, and how quickly you would hear about a lapse. Those two answers are worth having explicitly rather than assuming, because the difference between them only becomes visible on the day it matters. And whatever you decide about tracking, keep asking the subcontractor's agent for the endorsement itself — that is a different request to a different person, it is the only way to see what an additional-insured endorsement actually says, and no system replaces it. If what you are weighing is paying somebody to do the chasing rather than asking a favor, that is a different comparison.
Keep the relationship. Hold the record.
Free for up to 10 subcontractors, no card. Your broker keeps doing what they are good at; the tracking stops depending on anyone's week.