QuickBooks Online has no native certificate of insurance tracking. COISoftware runs alongside it: your vendors and payments stay in QuickBooks, while every COI is read, verified against your requirements and renewed before it lapses. Upload a certificate above to see it read in seconds.
Last updated July 2026
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What each approach actually does with a vendor certificate of insurance.
| Capability | QuickBooks Online custom field | QuickBooks Desktop | COISoftware alongside QuickBooks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Store the COI PDF | Yes, as an attachment | Yes, as an attachment | Yes, indexed and searchable |
| Record an expiration date | Manually, on Plus and Advanced | Yes, a built-in field | Yes, read from the certificate |
| Read limits off the certificate | No | No | Yes, automatically |
| Check limits against your rules | No | No | Yes, on every certificate |
| Verify additional insured wording | No | No | Yes, flagged when missing |
| Alert before a policy expires | No | Limited | Yes, automated reminders |
| Request the renewal from the vendor | No | No | Yes, automatically |
| Produce a compliance report | No | No | Yes, one-click export |
COISoftware is an independent product and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Intuit or QuickBooks. It runs alongside QuickBooks rather than replacing any part of your accounting workflow.
QuickBooks is an accounting system. It knows who your vendors are and what you paid them. It was never built to judge whether their insurance is any good, and Intuit has never added the feature to QuickBooks Online.
There is no certificate of insurance field, no expiration tracking and no alerting in QBO. Intuit support has confirmed this repeatedly in its own community forums. QuickBooks Desktop has a basic subcontractor certificate date field, but it was never carried across.
The common workaround on QuickBooks Online Plus and Advanced is a custom date field. It holds the date, including a wrong one, and it will not tell you when that date passes.
You can attach a COI PDF to a vendor record. The file sits there. Nothing reads the limits, checks them against your contract, or notices that the policy expired in March.
Teams that track certificates in a separate spreadsheet end up with vendors they pay but never asked for a COI, and vendors they chase who stopped working with them a year ago.
The same vendor file drives 1099 filing and insurance compliance. One is enforced by the IRS and the other by your contracts, and only the first has a deadline that makes anyone check.
Vendor compliance lands on whoever owns the vendor file, which is usually accounting. It is genuine risk management work handed to a team without a tool for it.
This is one of the most persistent unmet requests in the QuickBooks ecosystem. Bookkeepers and controllers ask for vendor COI expiration tracking, and the answer is a workaround: a custom field, a note on the vendor profile, or a purchase order bent into a compliance log. Our guide to tracking certificates of insurance in QuickBooks walks through each workaround and where it breaks. The practical answer is not to force the accounting system to do compliance, but to let each system do the part it is good at.
A clean split. Vendor records, bills and payments stay exactly where your bookkeeping already lives. Certificate collection, reading, verification, renewal and reporting move to a system built for it.
Forward or upload a COI and the insurer, policy numbers, coverage types, limits, effective and expiration dates and additional insured status are pulled automatically, including from scans and phone photos.
Set your minimum limits and required endorsements once. Every certificate is checked against them, so a short general liability limit or a missing additional insured endorsement is flagged on arrival.
Reminders go out before a policy expires and the vendor is asked for a renewed certificate. This is the single biggest gap in every QuickBooks workaround.
Import your QuickBooks vendor list so the people you pay and the people you require certificates from stay the same set, rather than two lists drifting apart.
Collect the W-9 and the COI in the same onboarding step, so a new vendor is set up correctly for both 1099 reporting and insurance compliance from day one.
Export a current compliance report to Excel or PDF whenever a client, insurer, lender or auditor asks for evidence, without rebuilding it from the vendor list by hand.
This is the same approach that works for other systems of record that hold vendors but do not judge insurance, including COI tracking alongside Procore for construction and Yardi, AppFolio and Buildium for property management. The underlying engine is the same COI software that powers COI compliance scoring and renewal tracking.
Four steps, and none of them change how you do your books.
Export the vendor list from QuickBooks and import it, so the vendors you pay and the vendors you track certificates for are the same set from the start.
Tip: Start with only the vendors whose contracts actually carry insurance requirements. That is usually far fewer than your full vendor list.
Enter the coverages, minimum limits and endorsements each vendor type must carry, taken from your contract or lease rather than from memory.
Request a COI from each vendor or forward the ones already in your inbox. Each is read automatically and checked against the requirement, with exceptions flagged for review.
Reminders chase expiring certificates without anyone watching a calendar, and a current compliance report exports in one click when someone asks for proof.
US teams whose vendor file lives in QuickBooks and whose contracts make them prove those vendors are insured.
If you keep the books for construction or property clients, vendor COIs land on you because you own the vendor file. Tracking them properly is a service you can charge for rather than an unpaid risk you absorb, and it does not require changing how you run QuickBooks.
Vendor onboarding already collects a W-9 and banking details. Adding the certificate to that same step closes the gap where a vendor gets paid before anyone confirmed coverage. The wider workflow is covered on our vendor insurance compliance software page.
Many small US contractors and landlords run their whole business on QuickBooks and hire subs constantly. An uninsured sub is the exposure that a workers compensation audit turns into your payroll, which is why subcontractor COI tracking matters well before a company is large enough for a risk department. Smaller teams usually start with COI tracking for small business.
Not natively. QuickBooks Online has no certificate of insurance tracking feature. You can attach a COI PDF to a vendor and record an expiration date in a custom field on the Plus or Advanced plans, but QuickBooks will not read the certificate, verify coverage limits, or alert you before a policy expires.
Partially. QuickBooks Desktop includes a basic field for subcontractor insurance certificate dates on the vendor record, which QuickBooks Online does not have. It stores the date only. It does not read the certificate, check limits against your requirements, or request a renewal from the vendor.
No. COISoftware is an independent product and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Intuit. It runs alongside QuickBooks: you import your vendor list, and certificate collection, verification, renewal chasing and reporting happen in COISoftware while your accounting stays in QuickBooks.
On QuickBooks Online Plus or Advanced, open Settings, then Custom fields, and add a Date field applied to Vendors, named something explicit such as COI expires. You can then filter and export the vendor list by that field. Every date still has to be entered and maintained by hand.
No, and you should not. QuickBooks stays your system of record for who your vendors are, what you pay them and what you file at year end. Only the compliance judgment moves: reading each certificate, checking coverage against your requirements and chasing renewals before they lapse.
Below roughly 20 active vendors with low exposure, a QuickBooks custom field is a reasonable stopgap and you probably should not buy anything. Past that, or as soon as a contract requires you to prove enforcement, the manual reading becomes the bottleneck and the risk stops being the missing date and becomes the coverage nobody checked.
