Extraction is accurate on a clean certificate and less so on a phone photo of a fax. Two minutes of checking on the first few certificates tells you how much attention the rest need.
What to check, in order
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Open the certificate next to the PDF
Open the contractor's Insurance tab and open the certificate card. The original PDF is one click away — put it side by side with what was read.
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Expiration dates
Check the expiration dates first. Everything else is reference; the dates are what drive alerts and status. Check each coverage's date, not just the first one — they differ more often than people expect.
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Limits
Then the limits. A limit read as $1,000,000 when the certificate says $100,000 will show a contractor as compliant who isn't. Zeros are the field most worth a second look.
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Insured name
Then the insured name. Mostly matters on bulk imports, where it decides which contractor the certificate attaches to.
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Fix and save
Correct anything wrong directly on the card and save. Your correction stands — nothing re-reads the file behind you and overwrites it.
When a certificate reads badly
Almost always the source, not the certificate. A crisp PDF from a broker reads near-perfectly; a photo of a printout, taken at an angle, will not. If a contractor's certificates are consistently unreadable, ask them to have their broker email the PDF instead — it's less work for everyone than correcting fields by hand every year.
Careful
What you still have to judge yourself
Whether the coverage is right — additional insured wording, waiver of subrogation, primary and non-contributory — is a reading of the endorsements, and no extraction does it for you. The COI audit checklist covers the eight things worth checking before you accept a certificate.