Risks are part and parcel of any business endeavor. The adage goes “you cannot discover new oceans unless you leave your shore.”
But that doesn’t give you license to underprepare and build a raft of sticks, or allow your craft to fall to disrepair mid-voyage. To stay afloat, businesses should actively manage their risks and protect themselves from potential liabilities.
One way that businesses can do that is by keeping a careful record of their certificates of insurance (COIs). COIs guarantee that your contractors have liability insurance, and that you will not be held accountable for damages arising from unfortunate circumstances. You’d think that fact alone would net COI tracking a top-tier priority among businesses across the board. You’ll be surprised, however, to see so many fail to manage their COIs and incur liabilities that could have been avoided entirely otherwise.
The most common reason? They don’t have a COI tracking system.
COI tracking deals with a lot of paperwork, and it’s easy to lose track of information and dates that you have to take note of, often simultaneously. It also requires you to be 100% accurate 100% of the time, because one mistyped detail could cost your company significantly.
By automating certain processes and generating useful reminders, COI tracking systems make your work a lot easier and more manageable. Here are key reasons why you should consider getting one for your business:
1. It Reduces Manual Labor and Paperwork
With a COI tracker, you eliminate the need to pore through each document by automating the tabulation process. Why suffer through the tedium of going through COIs and making sure that you recorded everything properly when you can get a machine to do it for you? Menial tasks like recording certificate issuances, risk management assessment, and expiration tracking can now be done almost entirely by COI trackers.
2. It Eliminates the Factor of Human Error
Around 90% of traffic accidents are caused by human error. The same is true for COI tracking errors: tedium leads to lack of focus, which in turn leads to mistakes in tabulation. The problem is that for COI tracking, something as minor as missed details and misspellings can have costly consequences. By having a COI tracking system automating the most tedious and repetitive processes (e.g. data entry) the risk from human error is effectively eliminated.
3. It Enhances Employee Productivity
In the past, it was the custom to assign one person to manage COIs and have him/her keep jot down all the details and keep track of all the dates. However, for smaller companies that needed all the help they could get, this wasn’t an ideal setup. By taking the time-intensive tasks off the table, COI trackers free up much-needed hands to do more essential work around your environment.
4. It Automatically Intimates COI Expiration Dates
COIs are only valid until the end of the policy period. That can mean a world of (financial) hurt if you don’t have replacement COIs on your desk before they expire. That problem is done away with if you have a COI tracking system that automatically reminds you to do just that weeks before expiration.
5. It Reminds You to Follow-Up on Insured Compliance
Arguably one of the finer functions of COI trackers, they help you diagnose Insured compliance and tell you if an Insured needs to be notified and followed-up. This is a critical feature: Insured compliance is the one thing between your company and a ridiculous liability claim, and to fail to give it the attention it deserves is to do so to your own detriment. Luckily, COI tracking systems can be counted on to remind you about these important matters.
Proper COI tracking will not only help your business minimize risks by avoid liabilities, it will also improve your company’s market standing in the long run. ******