Certificate of insurance software produces the certificates a brokerage owes its clients, checks them against the contract that defines what they must contain, and keeps a record of who approved each one. The useful test is not whether it stores certificates. It is whether it can produce several hundred correctly named certificates for a renewal without anyone opening Word.
Updated September 2026.
What certificate work actually looks like today
Ask an account manager how a large certificate batch gets done and the answer is a workaround. Export the holder list from the BMS. Mail-merge it in Word. Print the result to PDF. Then split that PDF page by page, renaming each file by hand so the right certificate reaches the right holder.
One account manager described her largest batch, ninety certificates, as a three hour afternoon done "while trying to keep afloat with my day." That is the real alternative most software is competing against, and it is why the first question about any certificate tool is how many it can produce in one run.
Why batch size is the number that matters
Certificate volume is not spread evenly across a book. At one national brokerage, roughly five percent of accounts carried more than ninety percent of the certificate production workload. Those are the largest and most operationally complex relationships, the ones a brokerage can least afford to serve badly at renewal.
Core production systems handle the other ninety-five percent well. They tend to cap a run at ten certificates, which is fine for a small commercial account and useless for a client that needs several hundred at once. If a tool cannot run the batch, the batch goes back to Word.
Checking the certificate against the contract, not a template
Most certificate tools compare what was issued against a stored requirement list that somebody typed in once. That list ages, and it was an interpretation of the contract rather than the contract itself.
The more reliable check reads the actual document, the lease, the master service agreement, the subcontract or the tender, and compares the certificate against the clause. Limits, additional insured wording, waiver of subrogation, primary and non-contributory. Every finding comes back quoting the page it came from, so verifying it takes seconds instead of a re-read.
What to ask when you evaluate
- How many certificates in a single run, and is there a file size ceiling?
- Can it issue on ACORD, on CSIO, and on our own form?
- Does it compare against the contract, or against a requirement list somebody maintains?
- Does every finding quote its source page?
- Can a previously issued batch be pulled back into an editable table for a correction and reissue?
- Who approves issuance, and is that gate enforced or optional?
The last one matters more than it first appears. The regulated act is issuance, not analysis, and a tool that issues without a licensed person approving it creates a problem rather than solving one.
What the numbers look like when it works
During a nine week pilot at Westland Insurance, a batch of ninety-five certificates was produced in three minutes and fifty-four seconds, timed, against the team's own three hour benchmark for ninety done by hand. A separate client book of a hundred and fifty-two certificates came out of a hundred and eighty page unstructured source document in under fourteen minutes end to end, including the reformatting.
Across the pilot, fourteen users processed roughly eight hundred and forty documents and generated three hundred and ninety-two certificates, with zero incidents recorded on issued certificates. Licensed staff reviewed and issued every one. Bramble drafts, it does not issue.
Where this leaves the renewal
The point of taking the batch from an afternoon to four minutes is not the four minutes. It is that the comparison work nobody had time for, checking what changed on the expiring policy and what the contract actually asks for, can now happen inside the same renewal window.