How it works

Everything a careful reviewer would check, on every certificate you hold.

If you are a general contractor running roughly 20 to 100 subcontractors — or a larger firm on Pro, with no vendor cap — this is the job that lands on one person’s desk and never finishes. Here is exactly what WatchMyCover does with it, and exactly what it does not.

What is automated, and what is not.

A person enters the certificate. Not a scanner, not a model. Someone opens the PDF and types the limits, the dates and the endorsements into a form built from your requirement, one field per line the contract cares about.

WatchMyCover does the comparing, and shows its working. Every value is measured against your template, every gap is quantified in dollars, and every verdict carries the sentence that produced it. Nothing is inferred from a document nobody read.

We are aware this is the part a competitor would leave vague. A comparison you can audit line by line is worth more to you than an extraction you would have to check anyway — and if you are going to trust a number in a lawsuit, you should know who put it there.

Castellano Concrete & FlatworkIllustrative data

Coverage	Your requirement	On the certificate
General Liability	$1,000,000 / $2,000,000	$1,000,000 / $1,000,000
Workers' Compensation	$1,000,000	$1,000,000
Automobile Liability	$1,000,000	$1,000,000
Umbrella / Excess	$2,000,000	$2,000,000

General Liability aggregate limit of $1,000,000 is below the required $2,000,000.

The rules engine

What gets checked

Your requirement template is the specification. Every certificate is measured against it by the same rules every time, so two people reviewing the same vendor a month apart reach the same verdict.

Castellano Concrete · findingsIllustrative data

Critical
General Liability general aggregate of $1,000,000 is below the required $2,000,000.
Critical
Workers’ Compensation is required but is not evidenced on the certificate.
Needs review
General Liability states the additional insured endorsement on the certificate, but a certificate cannot amend a policy. Request the endorsement form (CG 20 10 / CG 20 37) to confirm it.

Copy any of these into an email to the broker without editing it. That is what they are written for.

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Coverage limits: Each-occurrence and aggregate, per coverage type, compared against the minimum your contract sets. A limit that is merely present is not a limit that is sufficient.
Endorsements: Additional insured, waiver of subrogation, and primary and non-contributory wording. These are the clauses that decide whether a claim actually reaches the right policy — and where a certificate only asserts them, you get a "needs review" and the form number to ask for.
Dates on both sides: Expiry, and also the effective date. A certificate issued for a policy that has not incepted yet leaves you uncovered today, and it is easy to miss.
Coverage that is absent: A missing workers' compensation line is raised as a critical finding rather than a warning to triage later, because on a job site that is the one that ends up in court.
Coverage you did not ask for: Anything carried but not required is recorded as informational. It never affects the verdict, and a reviewer still sees the whole certificate.
Every verdict, in writing: Findings are phrased as a sentence you can forward to a broker unedited, with the required value and the actual value side by side.

Eight coverage types, four of them pre-printed.

The first four are the rows a broker fills in on the ACORD 25 itself. The rest are written into the form’s open section or supplied separately, so if your contracts demand them, the requirement template is where you say so.

General LiabilityPre-printed on the ACORD 25
Workers' CompensationPre-printed on the ACORD 25
Automobile LiabilityPre-printed on the ACORD 25
Umbrella / Excess LiabilityPre-printed on the ACORD 25
Professional LiabilityRecorded separately
Pollution LiabilityRecorded separately
Cyber LiabilityRecorded separately
Builder's RiskRecorded separately

Renewal chasing

Once it is on, the follow-ups happen whether or not you remember.

Chasing is off for a new account, and starts when you switch it on in Settings. From then, each policy expiry gets up to five reminders: thirty days out, fourteen, seven, the day before, and overdue. Each policy period gets its own ladder, so a renewed certificate is chased again next year with no cleanup on your side.

Coverage gaps do not wait for a date. A vendor whose limits fall short is chased straight away, because the shortfall is live today. The email carries an upload link that needs no login; a reply with the PDF attached comes to your inbox, and you record it.

Renewal chase · 7 days outIllustrative data

To: dean@brightlinemech.example — Brightline Mechanical HVAC

Renewal needed: General Liability for Brightline Mechanical HVAC

Hi Dean,

The General Liability on the certificate of insurance we hold for Brightline Mechanical HVAC expires on Sep 30, 2026.

Please send the renewal certificate before the expiry date so there is no gap in your approval.

Send the renewal certificate here — no account, no password, nothing to sign up for:
watchmycover.com/u/…

Replying to this message with the PDF attached works just as well.

The register

What an owner asks you for.

Export one row per vendor with the coverage on file and the reason behind every verdict. Send it to an owner, a developer, or an auditor without editing it first, or share it as a link that expires on a date you choose.

History

Superseded, never deleted.

A renewal that fully replaces a certificate sets it aside rather than deleting it, and every verdict is recorded: each vendor’s page shows the history of its verdicts and who changed what. When a claim asks what you held and when you held it, the answer already exists.

Put your own vendor list in and see what comes back.

Or start with the prices, which are published, and how the documents are held.

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