Every certificate you upload is read automatically. Nobody types a date in, which is the point — manual entry is where expiry tracking quietly goes wrong.
What gets extracted
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Insured name | The contractor the certificate covers. Used to match it to a record on a bulk import. |
| Carrier | The insurer that issued the policy. |
| Certificate holder | Who the certificate was issued to — usually you. |
| Coverages | Each policy line separately: type, policy number, limits. |
| Limits | Per-occurrence and aggregate, where the certificate states them. |
| Effective and expiration dates | Per coverage, not one date for the whole certificate. |
| Description of operations | The free-text box, which is where additional insured wording usually lives. |
Per-coverage dates matter more than they sound
An ACORD 25 isn't one policy. It's several, each with its own dates, and they rarely line up. General liability might run to December while the workers' compensation policy ended in March.
Because each coverage carries its own expiry, a certificate can lapse one line at a time — and a contractor can be Non-Compliant on a certificate that looks current at the top of the page. This is the single most common thing a spreadsheet misses, because a spreadsheet has one column called "expires".
What it can't do
- It doesn't judge endorsements. Whether you're properly named as an additional insured is a question about the endorsement form, not the certificate face — and it's a question you still have to answer. CG 2010 vs CG 2037 explains what to look for.
- It's reading a document, not verifying it. Extraction tells you what the certificate says. It doesn't confirm the policy is in force with the carrier.
- A bad scan is a bad read. A photograph taken at an angle in poor light will produce worse results than a clean PDF from the broker.
Note
What happens next
Extraction is very good and not infallible, so spot-check the first few: Review and correct a parsed COI.