Tracking Certificates of Insurance

Tracking Certificates of Insurance

I can’t think of any of our contractor clients who don’t have to deal with Certificates of Insurance. A certificate of insurance is proof of insurance, what type, and when it expires.  It’s our responsibility to track these expirations and receive updated certificates before any additional payments are made.

Then during an insurance audit, we’re required to produce the certificates for our subcontractors showing that they had coverage during the insurance audit period. If not, we’ll be hit with additional premiums to cover these contractors—expensive!

You may know that the 4-4 Vendor screen in Sage 100 Contractor has a Certificates tab. Let’s review some practical ways to use this information, and some easy reports to stay on top of renewal requests.

On the Certificates screen, you can setup a Quick List of insurance types, or free-type them as needed. We recommend creating the list for consistency.

A few years ago, Sage added a Job column so you can reference a cert for a specific job; very handy. The Received column is for the date you received the cert. The Expires column tracks the expiration for the type of insurance, which is part of the report you’ll run each month. You may have one cert with several types of insurance, and they may expire on different dates, so use multiple rows.

Let’s talk about the Warning and Stop Pay columns. If you put a ‘Y’ for Yes in the Warning column, you’ll receive a message when you select that vendor’s AP invoices to pay that indicates which vendors you’ve selected have expired certificates. You can continue and print the check if you choose, or go pick up the phone and request the updated cert.

If the Stop Pay column has a ‘Y’ for Yes, you will not be able to cut the check until there’s a current date.

Each month, run the 4-1-1-41 report for the upcoming month to see what is expiring. This report includes phone numbers, so give them a call and stay on top of the expirations. Consider an alphabetical binder for all of these, something you can hand the auditor. – CMW