What your subcontractors actually have to do

There is no account for them to forget

You request a certificate from a subcontractor and they get an email with a link. The page carries your company's name and asks only for the outstanding COI. They take a photo of the certificate or attach the PDF their agent sent, and that is the end of their involvement.

No password to set. No app to install. No account to be locked out of eleven months later when the renewal is due and the person who set it up has left. It opens on a phone, because that is where it will be opened — usually in a truck, often one-handed.

Because the link is unusual, some subs reasonably wonder whether it is a phishing attempt. We wrote a page for them explaining how to check it is genuine — including telling them to phone you on the number they already have rather than any number in the email. You can send it alongside your first request.

The other thing that stalls a first request is a sub who does not have a current certificate and is not sure how to get one. That is a two-line email to their own agent, and the page that spells out what to ask for is written for them rather than for you — sending it is usually faster than explaining it.

What the page shows them

• Only the outstanding COI. An approved current certificate drops off the list, so a sub is not asked to send the same one again.
• Your name and your branding, not ours — it should look like it came from the contractor they are working for, because it did.
• A confirmation in place, once the COI uploads. The tile they just used says the file arrived and is being reviewed, rather than vanishing and leaving them wondering whether it worked.

Request links are scoped to COIs. You can regenerate a link if it was lost, or revoke one if it went to the wrong person. W-9, license, safety-card, and custom-document requests are not currently supported.

What happens when they don't reply

Which is most of the time, at first — not out of obstruction, but because a renewal certificate is nobody's most urgent job until it is.

Sealinn watches the supported expiry dates your reviewer records on each approved current COI and chases ahead of them, by default at 90, 60, 30 and 7 days before expiry. General liability, workers compensation, auto, and umbrella or excess dates can run on their own timetables, while blank dates remain missing rather than being copied from another row. These recorded certificate dates are not carrier confirmation that coverage is in force. You can pick a different cadence from 90, 60, 30, 14, 7, 3 or 1 days out, and choose whether each COI reminder goes to the subcontractor, to your own team, or to both.

If a COI reminder goes unanswered for 3 days it escalates to you, so a silent sub becomes something you know about rather than something you find out about. The cadence always runs by email. On Growth and above, a current preference submitted through the subcontractor record's upload page can enable the same scheduled reminders by text; you can also send a staff-triggered reminder from their record.

This is the one requirement the certificate itself is worst at delivering — the ACORD 25's cancellation clause promises you almost nothing in practice, which 30 days notice of cancellation explains. Running the countdown yourself is the part you can actually make real.

When what they send is wrong

You reject the COI with a reason your reviewer identified using the requirement checklist, and the sub gets that reason plus a fresh upload link in the same message — so "the waiver is missing" arrives with the means to fix it attached. Rejected COIs stay recoverable for at least 3 days in case the rejection was the mistake; after that grace period, a scheduled purge deletes the stored file before removing its record and retries later if storage deletion fails.

What this does not solve

None of this makes a subcontractor produce insurance they do not have. If no acceptable document arrives, reminders establish that the paperwork remains unresolved sooner; they do not establish that the subcontractor is uninsured.

What it does remove is the part that was costing you: remembering who owes what, noticing a date before it passes, and writing the chasing emails. That is most of the work, and it is all of the part that gets dropped when a job gets busy.