Why Property Managers Need to Track Certificates of Insurance & Ensure Compliance
As a property management company, maintaining diligent records of your tenants, vendors, suppliers, and contractors’ certificates of insurance (COIs) is a time-consuming and difficult task. It’s tedious work to verify and keep track of when each certificate needs renewal, however, it should be a top priority.
Effective COI tracking is important to ensure each tenant, vendor, supplier, and contractor is compliant with your insurance requirements. Property managers should go beyond publishing the insurance requirements in leases or contracts and taking the insured’s word that they’re compliant. Implementing a proactive and digital approach to track certificates of insurance is necessary to protect against potential underinsured claims, expensive lawsuits, and more.
Check out these reasons on why property managers should have a streamlined process in place to track COIs and maintain vendor compliance.
Why Property Managers Should Effectively Track Certificates of Insurance
Protecting a property with the correct types of insurance falls within the property manager’s job description and failure to do so is a serious risk that should be avoided, at all costs. Each property or lease that you manage requires specific insurance coverage to be in place. Many times, the tenants, vendors, and contractors don’t carry the required types of coverage specified in your agreements.
Everyone leasing or working on your property needs to submit a COI and each one needs to go through review to ensure appropriate coverage is in place, insureds are compliant, and your organization is protected from exposures associated with their procedures.
Accidents and damage occur and if tenants, suppliers, contractors, or vendors don’t carry the right kind of insurance, it turns into an expensive hassle for everyone involved – mainly the property owner. Maintaining records of COIs from each party involved also helps reduce your general liability insurance premiums.
Property managers need to request a COI from each tenant, supplier, contractor, or vendor before the beginning of work and/or the start of a contract. Renewal certificates also need to be collected and verified on a year-to-year basis.
Insurance policies are also often updated, changed, or canceled during the lease or agreement, so having an effective tracking process helps property managers acknowledge all changes, updates, and cancellations to guarantee continuous compliance.
How to Streamline & Automate COI Tracking to Guarantee Compliance
Property managers continue to collect and track COIs by hand which is time-consuming and causes expensive errors. Lucky for you, a certificate of insurance tracking software can replace the Excel spreadsheets, paper printouts, Outlook reminders, and file cabinets that are wasting your time and resources.
SmartCompliance helps property managers manage the everyday tasks and associated stress of tracking COIs and protects the company against claims and litigation. Our COI compliance software manages everything from vendor contact information to certificate collection to compliance reporting, so your company can ensure end-to-end compliance. Request a free demo today to get started!
