COI tracking software: what a small GC actually needs

The job, in four steps

Strip away the feature lists and certificate of insurance tracking — subcontractor compliance, whatever the software calls it — is four repeating tasks. A tool is worth its price only if it makes these four easier than the spreadsheet you'd otherwise keep:

• Collect — get a current certificate (and the underlying endorsements) from every sub before they mobilize, and again at each renewal.
• Check — confirm each certificate meets what your subcontract requires: the right limits, workers' comp, additional-insured status, a waiver of subrogation.
• Chase — notice a policy is about to lapse and get the renewal in hand before there's a coverage gap on your jobsite.
• Prove — keep a dated record of what was collected and when, so you can hand an auditor or an attorney a clean answer months later.

What a small GC actually needs

Map every feature back to those four jobs. Here's the capability list that actually moves the needle for a small contractor — and why each one matters:

• Reads the ACORD 25 for you. It should pull the carrier, limits, dates, and the ADDL INSD / SUBR WVD boxes off the certificate so you're not re-typing them. Re-keying by hand is exactly where a wrong limit or a stale date slips through.
• Checks against your own requirements. A generic "the certificate looks valid" is worthless if it doesn't know your GL minimums, whether you require workers' comp and a waiver of subrogation, or whether you need to be named additional insured. The check has to run against your rules, not a one-size template.
• Chases renewals automatically. Reminders that fire before a policy lapses — a 90 / 60 / 30 / 7-day cadence is sensible — so a coming expiry shows up on a dashboard instead of on a claim. This is the single feature that pays for itself.
• Lets subs upload with no account. An upload link they open on a phone, no app to install and no password to reset. If your subs have to create a login, most of them won't, and you're back to chasing by email.
• Per-project requirements. One job may demand higher limits or an extra endorsement than another. The tool should let each project carry its own rules and check each sub against the right one.
• Export and an audit trail. You should be able to hand over a clean PDF or spreadsheet on demand and show a dated, unalterable record of what changed and when. That record is the entire point of "prove."
• Pricing you can see, and a fair free tier. You should be able to read the price without a sales call, and a few dozen subs shouldn't trip enterprise pricing.

What you can safely ignore

A lot of this category is built for someone much bigger than a small GC — an insurance broker, a corporate procurement team, an enterprise vendor-risk department. Those features look impressive on a comparison chart and go unused on a jobsite. If a tool is heavy on the following, it's aimed at a different buyer, and you'll pay for the overhead:

• Broker and agent portals. Designed for insurance brokers administering books of business, not for a GC checking a few dozen certificates. You need to collect and verify, not run an agency.
• Insurer / carrier API integrations. Impressive on a feature list, largely irrelevant when your subs email you PDFs. The real bottleneck is reading the certificate, not a live carrier data feed.
• Enterprise vendor-risk scoring and questionnaires. Financial-health scores, security questionnaires, and multi-tier vendor onboarding are a procurement-department problem, not a jobsite one.
• Per-seat enterprise pricing and mandatory onboarding fees. A tool that assumes a team of compliance analysts prices for one. A small GC shouldn't pay for seats it will never fill or a setup package it doesn't need.

Before you buy anything

Three questions come before the shortlist, and none is about features. The first is whether you need to buy at all: if you can scan your whole list in a minute and you would notice a coming expiry yourself, a sheet is still doing the job, and where a spreadsheet holds up and where it quietly fails sets out that trade properly rather than talking you out of it. Take the free template and buy nothing. The same question is worth asking of the two other ways this gets done without software — a folder and a calendar and leaving it with your own broker — because both work at small scale and both fail somewhere specific. The second is what the whole thing actually costs once your own hours are in the arithmetic — that is its own page, because the invoice is usually the smallest of the three numbers. The third is whether you want to buy software at all rather than hand the work to a firm that does it for you, which is a different trade with a different failure mode — what you gain and what you stop holding is the comparison for that one.

Where Sealinn fits

Sealinn is built for exactly this buyer — the small general contractor, the four jobs, nothing bolted on for an enterprise. It reads each ACORD 25 field by field with AI (every value carries a confidence score, and anything it's unsure of goes to a human), checks the coverage against your own requirement rules, and chases renewals automatically 90, 60, 30 and 7 days before expiry. Subs upload through an upload link with no account and no app. You can set per-project requirement overrides, export reports to PDF, Excel or CSV, and there's an append-only audit log behind all of it that the application cannot edit. Free for up to 10 subcontractors, no credit card, with pricing you can read on the page above that.

Whatever you end up choosing, the setup question is the same one and it is worth asking every vendor: what does the first afternoon look like, and is the answer a scheduled call. Ours is written down — get the roster in, set the rules once, send the first requests — because a tool that needs somebody to walk you through it is a tool a small office quietly stops using.