Why we built CertRanger

If you run a construction business, you already know the feeling. The crews are moving, the schedule's tight, the budget's holding, and QuickBooks is more or less caught up — and then there's the insurance paperwork. A certificate of insurance from every sub you hire, and every one of them has to be right.

It's easy to let slide. There's always something more urgent on the job. But this is the one that waits for you.

Once a year, you probably get audited by your insurance company. If a sub worked for you without a valid certificate on file, they charge you additional premium for that sub's work — as if they'd gone uninsured and you were the one covering them. That can be thousands of dollars added to your premium, and the maddening part is how avoidable it was. Sometimes the certificate was never asked for. Sometimes it came in and sat in an inbox, but it wasn't the right one, and nobody had time to check.

The big construction companies don't lose sleep over this. They've got a whole department for insurance, and software that costs thousands of dollars a year to go with it. Staying covered shouldn't take a department, or spare afternoons you don't have.

So we built CertRanger to make it easy — and not just for the person requesting the COI. You shouldn't have to hound anybody, or learn to read an insurance form, to know you're covered. Your subs shouldn't get stuck running paperwork back and forth with their agent. And their agent should get a clear request they can fill right the first time.

We're careful about what CertRanger promises. It reads every certificate and checks it against what you asked for — the right company name on it, dates that cover the whole job, enough coverage to meet your minimums. It catches the honest mistakes that trip people up at audit: a wrong name, an expired date, a number that's short. What it won't do is pretend — it isn't hunting for fraud or calling the insurance company to confirm a policy is still active. It does what you'd do yourself, if you had the time to check every one.

That's the whole idea. The same kind of tool the big companies have always had, within reach of everybody else — so staying covered is one less thing on your plate.

P.S. Your first subcontractor's COI is on us — no credit card. Start free whenever you're ready.