What Winnipeg Property Managers Need to Know About Vendor Insurance Certificates
General information to help you keep your vendor paperwork organized. FORGE Vendor Desk does administrative document tracking only. We don't give legal, WCB, or insurance advice.
If you manage property in Winnipeg, you hire vendors: cleaners, contractors, snow removal, trades. You (hopefully) collect a certificate of insurance from each one. Here's what that document is, and the one thing about it that most often slips.
What a certificate of insurance is
A certificate of insurance (COI) is a one-page document from a vendor's insurance broker showing their coverage: the type, the limits (often $2,000,000 general liability), the policy number, and the effective and expiry dates. Sometimes you'll be listed as “additional insured.”
Why you collect them
If a vendor causes damage, or someone is hurt because of their work, and their coverage has lapsed, that exposure can land on you or the building. A current COI is how you confirm the vendor's insurance is real and active before they start.
How this differs from WCB
WCB clearances you can verify yourself, for free, on the Manitoba portal. COIs are different. They come from each vendor's own insurance broker, and there's no central, free place to verify them. You're relying on the vendor to send a current certificate, and to send a fresh one when their policy renews.
The most common gap
Collect the COI once at onboarding. File it. Never look at it again. The policy renews (or doesn't) a year later, the certificate on file is now stale, and nobody notices until there's a claim. This is the single most common gap we see. It's invisible until it isn't.
What to actually track
- Coverage type and limit
- Policy effective and expiry dates (the expiry is the whole game)
- Whether you're named as additional insured, if you require it
- A reminder to re-collect roughly 30 days before expiry
Keep it simple
One tracker, one row per vendor, with the expiry date and an automatic flag.
If watching all those renewal dates across every vendor isn't something you want on your plate, that's exactly what we do.