COI tracking without the certificate chase

Every general contractor and property manager is familiar with the drill. The certificate arrives in a PDF, someone retypes the carrier, policy number, and dates into a tracker, then the certificate expires three weeks later and the chase starts again. Dynamite Docs turns each COI into clean, confidence-scored rows. Compliance checks become a lookup, not data entry.

Try this workflow free or view pricing.

Certificates are high-volume, short-lived, and always behind

Each subcontractor carries a new certificate per project, and they expire on a rolling cycle. Tracking is a standing job, not a one-time cleanup.
The fields that matter, carrier, policy number, coverage dates, and limits, are exactly the fields that live in dense, vendor-formatted PDF boxes.
Certificate wording varies by insurer and by state, so a fixed template never survives contact with the real inbox.
Retyping certificates into a tracker or spreadsheet is the same transcription work every renewal, with a fresh chance for typos each time.

How Dynamite Docs handles COI tracking

01 — Drop the certificates in

PDFs and scans from subcontractors, brokers, or email forwards all work. Text-layer PDFs are parsed locally; scans are read by the vision model you choose.

02 — Fields are inferred, not templated

Insured, carrier, policy type, policy number, effective and expiration dates, and liability limits are pulled from each layout without a certificate template.

03 — Review the dates, skip the rest

Confidence scores flag the fields worth a glance, usually effective and expiration dates and the named insured. Correct once and the layout is remembered.

04 — Export to your tracker

Send clean rows to Excel, CSV, JSON, or Sheets, or push them with the API and webhooks. Your compliance spreadsheet stops being retyped.

Document types this workflow handles

Certificate of insurance PDFs — ACORD forms from every carrier
Additional insured endorsements — the riders behind the coverage
Policy declaration pages — the coverage amounts to verify
Renewal certificates — the ones that quietly lapse

What gets extracted from a certificate of insurance

Inferred per layout. A typical COI run yields:

Named insured — Summit Framing LLC
Carrier — Liberty Mutual
Policy type — General Liability
Policy number — GL-8821-4390-11
Effective date — 2026-09-01
Expiration date — 2027-09-01
Occurrence limit — $2,000,000
Aggregate limit — $4,000,000
Certificate holder — Apex Development Group

A realistic example

A batch of subcontractor certificates extracts to rows like these, ready for the compliance tracker:

Insured	Carrier	Policy #	Effective	Expiration	Occurrence
Summit Framing LLC	Liberty Mutual	GL-8821-4390-11	2026-09-01	2027-09-01	$2,000,000
BlueLine Electric	Zurich	EL-7701-1120-04	2026-08-15	2027-08-15	$1,000,000
Anchor Roofing Inc.	Travelers	GLC-5510-9812-7	2026-07-01	2027-07-01	$2,000,000

What good COI tracking looks like in practice

A mid-size general contractor collects certificates from dozens of subcontractors across active projects, and each certificate is a one-page PDF from a different insurer. The renewal cycle means the same vendor sends an updated certificate quarterly. Without tooling, a compliance admin copies the carrier, policy number, and dates into a spreadsheet for every certificate, every time, a job that grows with every new subcontractor and every project close-out, and one that is only as accurate as the last tired typist.

Extracting certificates into structured rows changes the workflow from transcription to review. The fields land as rows, confidence scores point at the values most likely to need a human glance, and the named-insured and dates you correct are remembered for the next certificate from the same layout. Your tracker gets updated by export, CSV, Excel, Sheets, or a webhook, so the compliance log stops being re-keyed and starts being a lookup.

The audit story improves too. When an incident happens, the certificate that covers the subcontractor in question needs to be retrievable and legible in minutes, not reconstructed from an inbox. Keeping the source PDF attached to its extracted rows means the evidence is a click away. Begin with the certificates you chase most, liability and workers-comp, and let remembered patterns cover the rest.

Why bring-your-own-AI matters for COIs

Certificates vary wildly by insurer, and the extraction model matters less than the correction loop: your risk team fixes a vendor format once and the pattern is remembered for every certificate that looks like it afterward.

COIs contain carrier and policy information you may not want shared with a general-purpose vendor. Your own key on a no-training provider, or a local Ollama model, keeps the documents off shared infrastructure.

Because most certificates arrive as text-layer PDFs, they are parsed locally with no AI spend at all. Vision is only used for the scanned or faxed ones.

Questions, answered

Can it read certificates that arrive as scans or faxes?

Yes. Scanned and faxed certificates go to the vision model you choose; text-layer PDFs are parsed locally with no AI spend. You can route the worst scans to your strongest vision key.

Every insurer formats certificates differently. Does a template exist?

No template needed. The schema is inferred per layout, and your corrections are remembered, so the second certificate from the same insurer is extracted more accurately than the first.

Does this verify that coverage is active?

It extracts the dates and limits printed on the certificate. It does not confirm coverage with the carrier. Keep that check with your broker or risk professional for high-value work.

Can I push certificates into our compliance tracker automatically?

Yes. Export clean rows to Excel, CSV, JSON, or Google Sheets, or use the API and webhooks to push extraction.completed events into your tracker.