Vendor insurance and the back-and-forth nobody counts

When people talk about maintenance workload, they count repairs. The time often goes somewhere else: the calls and emails around the repair.

“One area of property management that quietly consumed more time than I expected was vendor compliance—not the work itself, but the back-and-forth around it.”

He lists the calls he kept getting: “I’m on site but can’t access the unit.” “Do you have the COI on file?” “Can you confirm the work order?” “I missed the instructions — can you repeat them?” Individually minor. Together, in his words, they create interruptions, delays that push jobs out, and higher costs when vendors have to return.

The insurance certificate that lives “somewhere”

A former maintenance coordinator describes the same problem from the compliance side. His company used 20 or more vendors regularly. Each had a certificate of insurance on file “somewhere.” Maybe in a shared folder, maybe in an old email thread, maybe expired three months earlier without anyone noticing.

“I spent hours every week just chasing down updated COI documents. Calling vendors, emailing, following up. It was brutal and it still wasn’t enough.”

He notes the legal exposure he was worried about if a vendor with lapsed coverage caused damage or was injured. That is his description, and we are not lawyers. Take questions about liability to your own attorney.

What helped

The investor’s fix was to treat vendor interactions like tenant screening: clear rules, enforced consistently, before work starts. He describes a “gatekeeper” function that confirms the caller is an approved vendor, checks insurance, scope and access instructions, makes sure the required information is on file, and routes only true exceptions to him. His result: fewer “urgent” calls that were not urgent, less rescheduling over missing paperwork, and vendors who showed up more prepared.

Our take

Rules like these are ideal for a defined workflow. You decide what a vendor must have on file and what information a dispatch needs. The workflow checks, asks for what is missing and follows up. Your team handles the exceptions and the judgment calls. It does not replace your vendor relationships or approve spend. It stops your best coordinator from being the person who remembers every certificate.