Never pay an uninsured subcontractor.
The contract sets the requirements. Kernos makes payment obey them.

65% of GC claims start with subs

About 65% of general contractor claims originate from subcontractor work, and the average subcontractor liability claim runs around $125K.

Attribution: industry insurance analyses

1 in 17 lacks required workers’ comp

A 2026 analysis of California active contractor licenses against regulator data found roughly 1 in 17 non-exempt contractors lacks required workers’ compensation coverage.

Attribution: California regulator-data analysis

10–15 hours a week, per coordinator

Manual certificate tracking consumes an estimated 10–15 hours per coordinator per week — $20K+ per year, per person, spent recording receipts instead of verifying coverage.

• A GC with 15 subs faces roughly 45 COI expirations a year across GL, WC, and umbrella lines

Attribution: industry estimates

The certificate grants nothing

ACORD’s own guidance: a certificate listing additional insured or waiver of subrogation grants the holder no rights under the policy. Rights come only from the actual policy endorsements — if the endorsement was never issued, the certificate line is decoration.

Nobody is watching for cancellation

Since 2009 the ACORD 25 removed the days-of-notice blank: cancellation notice follows policy provisions, and the certificate holder receives nothing unless it is endorsed as a cancellation notice recipient. Most tracked subs never named you.

Control decides who pays

Courts have held general contractors liable for subcontractor injuries where the GC retained control of site safety — and courts in other states have found the opposite. Your protection depends on endorsements, not intentions.

Requirements become objects

Insurance requirements are extracted from the prime contract as typed objects — limits, endorsement requirements, notice recipients — not paragraphs in a PDF.

Every certificate is checked

A rules engine compares each certificate against the contract requirements: coverage lines, limits, policy dates, and the endorsement forms behind every promised status.

Gaps become exceptions

A missing CG 20 37 or a limit below contract is not a note in a spreadsheet — it becomes an exception with a named owner and a due date.

The follow-up is automatic

Chase emails go out on renewal dates and open exceptions until the gap closes. Expirations stop being a weekend surprise.

Payment waits for approval

Payment applications stay blocked until a qualified approver clears the exceptions — and the initiator cannot self-approve. The loop is not bypassed to keep things moving.

The chain is append-only

Every certificate, exception, chase, and approval lands in an append-only audit chain — who saw what, who decided, when, immutable after the fact.

ACORD 25

Certificates of liability insurance, parsed line by line: coverage lines, per-occurrence and aggregate limits, policy effective and expiration dates, certificate holder block.

CG 20 10 and CG 20 37

The endorsement forms behind “additional insured”: CG 20 10 for ongoing operations, CG 20 37 for completed operations — read for who is actually covered, at which limits, for how long.

WC 00 03 01 A

Workers’ compensation waiver-of-subrogation endorsements, checked against the written contract requirement — because a checkbox on a certificate is not the endorsement.