What is a Certificate of Insurance?

Simply put, a certificate of insurance, sometimes called proof of insurance, is a snapshot of the current active insurance policies that are in place for a particular company.  They are typically requested by customers, landlords, and vendors as a way to ensure that the company they’re currently or considering working with has the necessary insurance in place in the event that something happens arrising in an insurance claim.  Every certificate is assigned to a specific “holder” which is usually the company or legal entity that requested it.  Therefore, you can’t simply create one and provide it to multiple companies.  A certificate of insurance must be created for each specific each holder.  And again, certificates are only a snapshot and valid for the day they are generated as a result of the fact that insurance coverage can be cancelled or modified by the insured at any time.

Historically, there hasn’t been an easy or efficient way for businesses to request and manage their certificates of insurance.  In fact, most traditional insurance agents and brokers required the insured to either call or email them with their proof of insurance requests.  The agent is then required to manually populate and generate the certificate for the insured to provide to the holder that requested it.  This seemingly simple task can take days or even weeks to complete depending on the insurance agent’s workload and the fact that generating certificates doesn’t generate any revenue for the agent.  For customers who work with many clients and regularly need to generate and provide a certificate of insurance, this old fashioned model can be costly.

At Layr, we understand that commercial insurance is a necessary part of doing business and that proving you have it quickly can be the difference between closing a new client or not.  It’s for that reason that we made building and releasing our automated online certificate of insurance generator a top priority.  This tool enables all of our customers to generate proof of insurance instantly and from anywhere all without ever picking up the phone or sending an email.  Even better, existing certificates generated through our tool are automatically kept up to date as changes to insurance coverage are made throughout the policy year.  This means that any certificate of insurance you generate will always be up to date.

If you are just learning about this new functionality and you are a current customer, you can take the new proof of insurance generator for a spin or schedule a demo so we can show you how to use it.  If you are not currently a customer, we still have good news: you can use our entire online business insurance platform free of charge.  Simply register for a free account then transfer any of your current policies (also free of charge and automated) to enjoy all the benefits Layr offers including the newly released certificate generator.