Affordable COI Data Extraction
for General Contractors — No Compliance Suite Required

What COI Compliance Platforms Actually Do — and What They Skip

Start with the pricing, because the pricing tells you who the product was built for. myCOI/illumend doesn't publish a public price — "Schedule a Demo" pages with no self-serve sign-up reliably indicate a product priced for annual contracts, not monthly credit cards. Industry estimates place the starting point above $500 per month. COI Rocket starts closer to $200 per month. billy routes through "Contact Sales" as well. These numbers are not arbitrary — they reflect what enterprise buyers pay for a compliance management platform, not what a small GC pays for a point solution.

Here is what those platforms do with that monthly fee:

Notice what is missing from the list: data extraction from the COI PDF itself. Every single feature in the table assumes the COI data is already digitized — either entered manually by a user, uploaded by a subcontractor through a portal, or retrieved directly from a carrier's system. The extraction step — reading a COI PDF from an email attachment and getting the Named Insured, Policy Number, Carrier, Effective Date, Expiration Date, and coverage limits into a usable format — is the step that happens before any of these features activate. And it is the step none of these platforms solve. The International Risk Management Institute (IRMI) describes certificates of insurance as "one of the more dangerous documents that float between insureds, insurers, and a myriad of third parties" — because the data on them carries contractual consequences and errors create liability. That data matters. Getting it right matters. And the extraction of it — from the ACORD 25 form or from any carrier-specific variant — is the step nobody is pricing for the small GC.

The 10 Fields a GC Actually Extracts from an ACORD 25

The ACORD 25 Certificate of Liability Insurance form is the industry-standard document that most US insurance carriers issue as proof of coverage. It is not a policy — it is a summary of coverage, and its standard layout has been maintained by ACORD (Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development) for decades. Despite the standardization effort, across the hundreds of carriers and thousands of agencies that issue these forms, every COI looks slightly different. The fields are in approximately the same place — but font sizes, spacing, line breaks, and the inclusion of agency logos and disclaimers create enough visual variation that a template-based OCR tool, the kind that requires drawing bounding boxes around coordinates, breaks on a new carrier's format.

For compliance review purposes, a GC does not need every field on the ACORD 25. The essential set — the data points that determine whether a subcontractor can step onto a job site — clusters around ten to twelve columns:

Twelve fields. Across the thirty COIs from twenty-five subcontractors that a mid-sized GC reviews each cycle, that is 360 data points to pull from PDFs and type into a spreadsheet. The extraction itself — not the tracking, not the alerting, not the compliance rule engine — is where the manual hours accumulate.

The Cost Gap: $500/Month Compliance Suite vs $19/Month Extraction

Scale matters when pricing compliance. A national GC with 500 active subcontractors, a dedicated risk management department, and contractual obligations to owners and lenders that require auditable compliance records needs a platform. The $500 per month is not a cost — it is insurance against the cost of a subcontractor with lapsed coverage causing an uncovered loss on a $20 million project.

But as we covered in our breakdown of the 2026 document extraction pricing landscape, the gap between enterprise-tier pricing and what a smaller operator actually consumes in features is not about extraction quality — it is about everything wrapped around the extraction engine. A GC with twenty-five subcontractors — each submitting roughly two COIs per year, plus renewal certificates when policies renew mid-project — handles perhaps seventy-five to one hundred COI documents annually. That is six to eight COIs per month, reviewed in batch cycles before new subcontractors mobilize or existing policies approach expiration.

Here is what that volume costs across the available options:

The pricing comparison reveals a category distinction that most "COI tracking software" comparison pages omit: compliance platforms and extraction tools solve adjacent but different problems. A compliance platform manages the ongoing relationship with verified subcontractor insurance data. An extraction tool produces that verified data from PDFs. For the GC whose subcontractor count has not yet crossed the threshold where manual comparison of coverage limits becomes unmanageable, the extraction step — not the compliance management step — is the piece they actually need. At $19 per month for 400 credits, the Pro plan's credit allowance covers roughly one hundred COI extractions — matching the annual volume of a GC with twenty-five subcontractors — at roughly 1/25th of the myCOI starting price.

For a deeper look at how subscription pricing stacks up against per-use models across the broader document extraction market, see our comparison of pay-as-you-go vs subscription document extraction and our analysis of getting document extraction without an enterprise contract.

How Custom Column Extraction Reads Any Carrier's COI Format

The reason a template-based OCR tool cannot solve COI extraction is the same reason manual entry is tedious: no two carriers format the ACORD 25 identically. Travelers puts the agency information in a different position than Liberty Mutual. A regional carrier in Ohio may omit the umbrella row entirely because the sub doesn't carry excess coverage. A digitally generated COI from a broker's agency management system and a scanned paper COI from a local agent's office produce PDFs with entirely different pixel layouts — even though they contain the same twelve data points.

Template-based tools require you to teach them where each field sits by drawing a box around it on a sample document. When the next carrier's COI arrives with a different layout — which it will — the template fails and asks for another sample. With ten different insurance carriers across twenty-five subcontractors, you would need a template for each carrier format, and the tool's supposed time savings collapse under the template-training overhead.

ImageToTable.ai handles this differently through Custom Column Extraction: you define the field names you want — Named Insured, Policy Number, Carrier, Effective Date, Expiration Date, GL Limit, Auto Limit, WC Limit, Umbrella Limit, Additional Insured — and the AI reads each document by understanding what each field means rather than where it sits on the page. The same twelve column names work across a Travelers ACORD 25, a Liberty Mutual ACORD 25, a Chubb ACORD 25, and a scanned COI from a local independent agency — because the AI understands that "Policy Number" on a COI is the alphanumeric code in the policy information row, regardless of whether it appears at pixel coordinate (234, 567) or (312, 423).

This is the same semantic approach that distinguishes AI-based extraction from traditional OCR: the tool reads documents by meaning, not by coordinate. For a step-by-step look at what a COI extraction workflow produces — including handling multi-row coverage tables and checkbox fields — see the certificate of insurance to Excel extraction demo. Define the columns once. Apply the same column list to every subcontractor COI in a batch. The output is a single spreadsheet with one row per policy, ready for compliance review.

Monthly Batch Review: One Upload, One Spreadsheet, Twelve Columns

The practical workflow for a GC with twenty-five subcontractors looks like this: once per month — or per pay-application cycle, when sub COIs typically need to be current — the office manager or project coordinator collects the batch of COI PDFs from email attachments. These arrive from subcontractors' insurance agents, often PDFs attached to a brief email with no useful subject line. The upload step takes under a minute: drag all files into the tool. The twelve column names are already saved — type them once and reuse them across every batch. Hit process.

The ACORD 25 manual review that a typical GC administrator performs by eye — scanning for the named insured match, checking that effective dates are current, comparing coverage limits to contract minimums — still has to happen. But the data that feeds that review is already in a spreadsheet, not on a PDF open in a separate window. The extraction step that previously consumed a thousand keystrokes per COI — typing those twelve fields, switching between windows, correcting a transposed policy number — is reduced to the five to ten seconds it takes the AI to read each page and populate the columns.

At a hundred COIs per year, three minutes of manual entry per COI totals five hours of typing. Five to ten seconds of extraction per COI totals roughly seventeen minutes of processing. The difference — roughly four hours and forty minutes annually — is not a full-time position's worth of savings, but it is five hours that were previously spent on a task that produces no insight: copying text from one window to another. And at $19 per month, the cost of reclaiming those five hours is $228 per year — the equivalent of approximately one hour of a mid-level GC administrator's fully loaded labor cost.

What Extraction Doesn't Do — and Why That's the Point

An extraction tool does not send you an email thirty days before a subcontractor's general liability policy expires. It does not compare the extracted umbrella limit against the $5 million minimum your contract requires. It does not maintain a compliance dashboard with green-yellow-red status indicators. These are the features that a compliance platform provides and that a spreadsheet user must handle manually — checking dates against a calendar, comparing limit columns against written contract thresholds, following up with subcontractors whose COI is approaching expiration.

For a large GC, those manual steps are untenable — the risk of missing an expiration across five hundred subcontractors is too high, and the compliance platform's price is justified by the liability it prevents. For a small GC with twenty-five subcontractors, the manual steps are manageable. A spreadsheet with a "Days to Expiration" column that calculates =ExpirationDate - TODAY() and a conditional formatting rule that highlights cells in red when the value drops below thirty is a lightweight expiration alert. A side-by-side comparison of extracted limits against contract minimums in the same spreadsheet is a manual compliance review, but it takes minutes, not hours. The threshold at which a compliance platform becomes necessary is higher than most small GCs have been led to believe.

The spreadsheet is not the permanent solution — it is the right-sized tool for the current scale. And what feeds the spreadsheet is the extracted data. Getting clean, structured data from twenty-five subcontractors' COIs into that spreadsheet — without retyping three hundred and sixty fields by hand — is the piece of the workflow that a $500 per month compliance platform cannot justify for a GC that still operates below the threshold where risk of human error exceeds the cost of automation. For a broader view of how single-purpose extraction tools compare with multi-tool suites, see our breakdown of one extraction tool vs multiple specialized tools in total cost.

FAQ

Does this track COI expiration dates automatically?

No — ImageToTable.ai extracts the expiration date from each COI and places it in your spreadsheet. Tracking expiration — i.e. sending alerts when dates approach — is a compliance management function that falls outside what an extraction tool does. For a GC managing a few dozen subcontractors, a spreadsheet formula that calculates days remaining and a recurring calendar reminder achieve the same result without the platform cost. If your subcontractor count exceeds 100, or if your owner contracts require auditable automated compliance records, a dedicated compliance platform is the appropriate tool.

Can it verify that a subcontractor's coverage limits meet my contract requirements?

Extraction pulls the limit values from the COI — $1,000,000 for general liability, $500,000 for auto, and so on. Comparing those extracted values against your contract minimums is a manual step you perform in the same spreadsheet. An extraction tool gives you the numbers; a compliance platform gives you the comparison. The former costs $19 per month; the latter starts at $200 and climbs from there.

What if the COI is not an ACORD 25 format?

The tool reads any COI format — ACORD 25, ACORD 20 (additional insured endorsement), carrier-specific proprietary formats, scanned paper certificates from independent agencies, and even a screenshot of a COI taken from a subcontractor's phone. Because it reads by field meaning rather than form layout, the same column names work regardless of the carrier or format. The ACORD standard is the most common, but the tool does not require it.

How many COIs can I process on the $19/month plan?

The Pro plan includes 400 credits per month. A single COI extraction — reading all twelve fields from a one or two-page certificate — consumes one credit. At a hundred COIs per year (about eight per month), the Pro plan covers the full annual volume with credits to spare for other document types. If you occasionally need to process more — a subcontractor onboarding spike at the start of a new project, for example — additional credits can be purchased without changing plans.

Does the tool handle multi-page COIs with endorsements?

Yes. A COI with attached endorsement pages — common when an additional insured endorsement form (often ACORD 20 or a carrier-specific equivalent) follows the ACORD 25 — is processed as a single document. The AI reads across pages, extracting the additional insured status and endorsement form number from subsequent pages in the same file.

If my subcontractor count grows to 100, do I outgrow this approach?

At roughly 100 active subcontractors managing annual and renewal COIs, the volume of manual compliance review — comparing limits, tracking expirations, following up with subcontractors — begins to justify a dedicated compliance platform. But the extraction step does not disappear when you upgrade to a platform. The platform will still need the data. ImageToTable.ai's extracted spreadsheet output can be imported into myCOI, COI Rocket, or any compliance platform that accepts CSV or Excel uploads. Extraction and compliance management are sequential steps: one feeds the other, and neither replaces the other.