The Problem Everyone Talks About (But Nobody Fixes)

Scroll through any insurance agent forum or Reddit community and you’ll find the same complaint, phrased slightly different ways:

“Right now I’m tracking everything in a shared Excel sheet. It’s a nightmare when certificates expire and we get blamed for not catching it.”

“We’re a small shop, 4 producers, can’t justify the big agency management systems.”

“The big players like AMS and Benefits Admin charge too much for what we need. We just want to make sure certs are current.”

These are not hypothetical frustrations. These are real agents—often working solo or in teams of fewer than 10—describing the exact problem CertTrack Lite was built to solve.

Why Spreadsheets Persist

The obvious question is: if tracking COIs in spreadsheets is so painful, why don’t these agents switch to dedicated software? The answer is a combination of cost and complexity.

Enterprise agency management systems—AMS360, Benefit Resources, HawkSoft—were designed for mid-to-large agencies with dedicated IT staff and budgets that can absorb $125-175/month or more for full platform access. For a solo agent or a four-person shop, that pricing doesn’t pencil out, especially when COI tracking is just one feature among dozens you may never use.

So agents do what makes economic sense: they keep a spreadsheet. They track expiration dates manually. They hope nothing slips through.

The problem is that hoping is not a compliance strategy.

The Tipping Point: When the Hard Market Makes It Worse

We’re in a hard insurance market. Carriers are tightening requirements. Project owners and general contractors are demanding more frequent certificate verification. The pressure on small agencies and contractors to prove ongoing coverage compliance has increased significantly.

That means more certificates to track, more frequent renewals to monitor, and more exposure when something lapses. The spreadsheet that felt manageable with 20 subcontractors now feels unmanageable with 50.

This is the moment when agents start looking for alternatives in earnest. But the alternatives they find are either too expensive, too complex, or both.

What We Built: Focused COI Tracking, Not a Full AMS

CertTrack Lite solves one problem: certificate of insurance compliance. You upload a PDF. Our AI extracts the key fields—insurer, policy number, coverage limits, expiry date. You see everything on a dashboard with clear expiry timelines. You receive automated alerts at 30, 15, and 5 days before a certificate expires.

No data entry. No spreadsheet maintenance. No enterprise software overhead.

Pricing starts at $29/month for the Starter plan, which covers solo agents and small contractors managing up to 50 active certificates. Growth and Enterprise tiers scale for agencies with up to 10 agents or larger vendor portfolios.

Why Now Is the Right Time

Small agencies have been stuck between two bad options for years: expensive enterprise software or manual spreadsheets. The AI tooling that makes PDF extraction fast and affordable didn’t exist at this price point even two years ago. Now it does.

That means we can build a focused COI tracking tool that actually fits the budget and complexity tolerance of a 1-10 person agency—and we can do it for a fraction of what the full AMS platforms charge.

If you’re still tracking COIs in spreadsheets, you’re not alone. But you don’t have to stay there.