Short answer
A free COI audit reviews three of your vendors’ certificates of insurance and reports what is wrong with them: expired or expiring coverage, limits below requirement, and additional-insured or waiver endorsements that are claimed on the certificate but not actually attached. CertShield returns the report within 24 hours, free, with no card and no call required.
How the audit works
Send three certificates
Email three vendor COIs — PDF, scan or phone photo, whatever you have. No call, no card, no form to fill in.
We read them and run your checks
Each certificate is read in full, including endorsement pages, and compared against standard requirements for the trade: limits, expiration dates, additional insured, primary and non-contributory, waiver of subrogation.
A person verifies every verdict
Nothing is auto-approved. Anything the model is less than 90% confident about, and every failing check, is reviewed against the original PDF before the report is written.
You get a report within 24 hours
A traffic-light PDF showing each vendor as compliant, expiring or non-compliant, with the specific reason for every flag. The report is yours whether or not you ever talk to us.
What we check on each certificate
- Insured legal entity matches the vendor you contracted with
- Every required coverage line is present
- Each limit against the requirement, line by line
- Policy effective and expiration dates, per coverage line
- Additional insured — ongoing operations, endorsement attached
- Additional insured — completed operations, endorsement attached
- Primary and non-contributory wording, evidenced
- Waiver of subrogation on GL and workers’ compensation
- Carrier identity and NAIC number resolve to a real carrier
- Layout and content signals that warrant a closer look
Not sure what some of those mean? Every term is defined in the glossary.
What we will not tell you
That you are guaranteed compliant. No document review can promise that, and any vendor who says otherwise is overselling. The report tells you what the documents show and what they fail to show.
That a policy has not been cancelled mid-term. Carriers do not broadcast mid-term cancellations to certificate holders. We mitigate it with written confirmations from the producer, notice-of-cancellation endorsements in your requirements, and re-verification on every new document — we do not claim to detect it.
Document review assistance — not legal, insurance, or professional advice.
Frequently asked
- Is the COI audit really free?
- Yes. Three certificates, no card, no call required. The report is yours to keep and to send to whoever else needs to see it.
- What do you need from me?
- Three vendor certificates of insurance as PDFs, scans or photos — and, if you have one, your written insurance requirement so we can check against your standard rather than a generic one.
- How long does it take?
- Within 24 hours on a business day. The reading itself takes under a minute per certificate; the rest is a person verifying the verdicts before anything is sent.
- What will the report tell me?
- For each vendor: whether coverage is currently in force, whether limits meet the requirement, how many days until expiration, and which endorsements are claimed but not evidenced — with the specific reason for every flag.
- Will you keep or share my documents?
- Your documents stay in your tenant on US infrastructure and are never used to train public models. Human corrections become internal accuracy test cases, and you can request deletion at any time.
- Is this legal or insurance advice?
- No. CertShield provides document review assistance — not legal, insurance, or professional advice. You remain the final approver on every verdict.