Product
What Sealinn checks — and what it doesn't
Every value on the certificate falls into one of three buckets: enforced against your requirement, read and shown to you, or captured and not checked. Here is which is which, without rounding up.
Everything is checked against your rules, not ours
Sealinn ships no opinion about what a subcontractor should carry. You set a requirement set — limits, which endorsements you need, which documents beyond the certificate — and every certificate that arrives is measured against that. A second set can override the first on a particular project, which is how one job demanding higher limits stops being a thing you remember by hand.
Because the rules are yours, who may change them is a separate decision from who may accept a document, and Sealinn keeps the two apart on purpose — otherwise a requirement can be lowered until a certificate passes and the record still shows a clean approval. Which roles hold which of those two is the setting worth getting right before you invite anybody.
What to actually put in those numbers is a separate question, and not one software should answer for you: it depends on the job, your state, and the contract above you. What to require before a sub starts walks through it.
Enforced — these block a certificate
A blocking violation means the document does not auto-approve and the subcontractor does not read as compliant. You can still approve it by recording an exception; what you cannot do is not notice.
| Requirement | What triggers a block |
|---|---|
| General liability, per occurrence | Below your minimum — or absent from the certificate entirely |
| General liability, general aggregate | Below your minimum, or absent |
| General liability expiry | Already past. Inside 30 days it is a warning, not a block |
| Workers' compensation | Required and no coverage shown. The expiry behaves like the GL date |
| Auto liability, combined single limit | Below your minimum, or absent |
| Umbrella / excess, each occurrence | Below your minimum, or absent |
| Products & completed operations aggregate | Below your minimum, or absent |
| Additional insured | Not present — or the certificate could not be read clearly enough to confirm it |
| Waiver of subrogation | Same: absent, or unreadable |
| Primary & non-contributory | Same: absent, or unreadable |
Every row above shares a property worth naming: they fail closed. A limit that is absent from the certificate blocks exactly like a limit that is too low, and "could not read it" produces a block rather than a pass — the flag says which of the two it was. That direction is deliberate, and how Sealinn reads a certificate explains why. It has not always been true: auto and umbrella once passed when the certificate showed no such section, which is the more common failure and the more dangerous one.
Read and shown to you — but not currently blocking
A handful of values are captured off the form and shown in the document record, but are not compared against anything at all. This list is the honest half of the page, and it is deliberately not padded:
- The two employers-liability disease limits — disease-each-employee and disease-policy-limit. The each-accident figure is used; these two are recorded only.
- Umbrella aggregate and the auto expiry date.
The certificate holder and the additional-insured name sit between the two lists, and which one they belong to is your choice. Both are always read and shown. Enter your legal name in your workspace settings and Sealinn also compares them against it: a certificate naming neither you nor anything close to you raises a warning and goes to a person instead of approving itself. It does not stop you approving it, because a wrapped job legitimately puts the owner in that box. Leave the legal name blank and no comparison runs.
Reading a value and enforcing a value are different promises. The lists above are which is which.
Beyond the certificate
A certificate is not the only paperwork a subcontractor owes you, and three other document types are read the same way — extracted field by field, checked, and tracked for expiry.
- [W-9](/guides/w9-from-subcontractors) — legal name, business name, tax classification, address, signature date, and whether a TIN is present. The number itself is never extracted or stored. A W-9 never auto-approves.
- [Contractor or trade license](/guides/contractor-license-verification) — number, issuing state and authority, classification, holder, and the printed status. A license showing expired, suspended, revoked or inactive is treated as a failure, not a note.
- [Safety certification](/guides/safety-certifications-to-require) — the certificate type (OSHA 10 and 30, OSHA 500 and 510, EM 385, CPR and first aid, competent person, crane, forklift), the holder, the issuing body and the dates. OSHA cards print no expiry and do not federally expire, so the validity window is your policy — 5 years unless you set something else.
You can also define document types of your own — a signed safety program, a drug-testing policy, whatever your subcontract asks for — and request them through the same portal the certificate comes through.
Rules we could never have anticipated
Beyond the standard requirements you can write your own checks in plain language, scoped to a document type — something like "the waiver names our company, not just the project". Each one is evaluated against the document when it arrives and flagged when unmet.
These are less reliable than the fixed-field checks above, for the obvious reason: a free-text rule is interpreted, where a limit is compared. So an unmet custom rule is presented as something to confirm rather than as settled fact, and one it could not evaluate says so instead of quietly passing. How to write one, and what each verdict does to a status covers the three outcomes and the one that catches people out.
What you get out of it
Everything checked is also everything reportable. four compliance reports — organization, expiring documents, subcontractor and project — plus your subcontractor roster and the audit log — each available as PDF, Excel or CSV. You can export the compliance ledger, and download the certificates themselves as a zip organized by subcontractor. None of that is gated on your plan, and none of it stops working if you cancel.
Set your requirements once, then stop re-reading certificates.
Your limits, your endorsements, your document list — checked against every certificate that arrives. Free for up to 10 subcontractors.