What is manual COI verification costing you?
The math behind "just keep doing it in a spreadsheet." Plug in your numbers — how many COIs you review, how long each one takes, and the realistic risk of a missed expiration. The calculator does the rest in real time.
Your annual cost of manual COI verification
$26,340
- Labor · 8 hours/mo · $3,840 per year
- Annualized risk · $22,500 per year (15% × $150,000)
Compared to COIverify pricing
- Solo plan ($99/mo)$1,188 / yr
- Team plan ($299/mo)$3,588 / yr
- Estimated savings (Team plan)$22,752 / yr
Where these numbers come from
Every input is sourced from real conversations with risk coordinators, AP managers, and ops leads at $5–50M general contractors and property management firms. The defaults below are the medians we've heard:
- 40 COIs per month— typical mid-market GC with 100–300 active subcontractor COIs. Property managers with 300–800 active vendor COIs review roughly the same volume because they're mostly renewals.
- 12 minutes per cert— done correctly. Faster than that means you're skipping the additional-insured language verification, which is where most claims problems originate.
- $40/hr loaded — AP clerk or risk coordinator, fully loaded with benefits, taxes, and overhead. Mid-cost-of-living markets. Adjust upward for high-cost metros.
- 15% annual missed-expiration probability— at the higher end if you're tracking in a spreadsheet with no automated alerts. Software pushes this toward 1–3%.
- $150K average incident cost — toward the low end of industry estimates. Single uninsured-loss events range from $50K to $5M+; we use a conservative working estimate.
What the calculator deliberately doesn't include
- Audit-finding remediation costs (regulatory, insurance, or owner audits where missing COIs surface).
- Legal fees defending uninsured-loss exposure even when the sub's policy ultimately responds.
- Reputational and contract-renewal cost from being the GC whose subcontractor caused a problem.
- The cost of finding and hiring the COI clerk in the first place.
We left these out because they're hard to estimate without your specific situation. They generally make the real cost higher than what the calculator shows, not lower.
How software changes the math
Software like COIverify reduces minutes per COI from ~12 down to ~1 (drop the PDF, glance at the verdict, intervene only on NEEDS REVIEW). It also pushes the missed-expiration probability from 10–25% down toward single digits because alerts are automatic. Plug both of those reductions in and the "cost of doing it in software" line in the calculator drops dramatically — typically to a few thousand dollars a year for mid-market firms.
Compare that to the Solo plan ($1,188/yr) or Team plan ($3,588/yr) and the math becomes obvious. The threshold where software starts saving money is around 25–30 active COIs. Below that, the spreadsheet is fine. Above it, the spreadsheet is leaking.