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5 Ways Jones Helps Procore Users Save Time On Managing Subcontractor COIs

How Jones Helps Procore Users Save Time

Speeding up the management of subcontractor COIs requires a combination of efficiency and optimization through the right subcontractor compliance management tool.

Here are the five strategies we focus on:

Note: Did you know Jones reviews insurance documents in under 24 hours? Talk to our team of experts today, and learn how Jones can help speed up your insurance compliance!

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Use Global Insurance Requirements For Subcontractors And Vendors

A trend that is becoming increasingly more common in the construction industry is the use of blanket additional insured endorsements. Essentially, a blanket additional insured endorsement provides coverage to other groups or individuals that were not initially named in the policy.

Your company can use the same blanket additional insured language in an endorsement for all subcontractors and vendors. This would enable you to create a set of Global Insurance Requirements that don’t differ from project-to-project.

With Global Insurance Requirements in the Jones + Procore Integration, all you need is one compliant COI for a subcontractor to work on any project across your Procore account.

Global Insurance Requirements in Procore

This helps teams save time in a few different ways:

  • Simplify renewals across all projects in Procore: If a subcontractor is working across 10 different projects on your account and their COI is expiring next month, you won’t need to collect 10 unique COIs. If the subcontractor has a Global Insurance Requirement, you will only need one updated COI for the sub to be compliant across all projects in Procore.
  • Avoid redundant communication: You won’t need to go back and forth with each subcontractor or vendor for multiple COIs and approvals on each new project.
  • Qualify subcontractors instantly for new projects: Subcontractors with global insurance requirements can be instantly qualified for projects in Procore, and get started working right away!

Don’t Waste Time Switching Between Tabs – Make Sure You Choose The Correct Procore Integration Partner

Needing to switch back and forth between tabs to manage compliance will significantly slow you down.

For example, each project accountant at Bulley & Andrews was wasting 2-3 hours per week on managing compliance. This was mostly due to the fact that Procore, their preferred ConTech solution for all things construction management, was not synced with their compliance software. This lead to a very manual, siloed, and time intensive workflow, and they needed to improve their construction accounts payable.

“Adding the Jones workflow to our Procore system really improved our overall efficiency. Today, the time we spend on managing insurance compliance is down from several hours to minutes.”

– Dana Erdman, Director of Technology & Innovation, Bulley & Andrews

Because Jones is the only insurance compliance management app in the Procore Marketplace with an embedded integration, the synchronization of data between Jones + Procore is unparalleled to any other company in the space. That being said, users can create new Jones projects directly within Procore. Once you create a new project in Procore, simply click the “Jones App – Compliance Solution” button, and you’ll be able to add the new project into Jones without needing to leave the Procore workflow.

Create a new project on Jones within Procore

Select the team members you want to add to the project, info for additional insured, and certificate holder details. It’s as quick as that!

Creating a new Project in Procore

Streamline COI Collection

Having a convoluted process for requesting COIs from subcontractors and vendors can slow down the whole compliance workflow. Collecting COIs needs to be simple and quick.

With Jones, users can send COI requests to subcontractors and vendors directly within Procore. There’s no need to switch over to Jones for this crucial task.

Request subcontractor COIs in Procore

Additionally, if you already have the COI from a vendor or subcontractor, you can manually upload it to Jones directly within Procore.

Add Subcontractor COIs in Procore

Automate COI Renewals

Managing a calendar of policy expiration dates for subcontractors and vendors can be a very time consuming ordeal. Actually following up with each subcontractor during renewal periods to collect their updated COIs can take even longer! Jones can automate this process, and proactively send out a series of emails one month before subcontractors’ COIs are about to expire.

Auto Renewal emails in Jones of Subcontractor COIs

Ensure New Requirements Can Easily Be Added To Projects

Let’s face it… some projects will have unique insurance requirements. That’s just the way of the construction industry, and there’s nothing you can change about that. However, it’s important for your team to easily be able to add new requirements to projects in Procore.

Adding custom requirements to projects in Procore is a fast and easy process with Jones. When requesting a COI from a subcontractor within Procore, all a user needs to do is click “Add Custom Requirements” from the dropdown bar.

Add new insurance requirements to a Jones Project in Procore

Requirements can be uploaded as a PDF or Word Doc, and they’ll be added to the Procore Project within 24 hours.

Ready to save time managing Subcontractor COIs within Procore?

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The Death Of The COI Tracker

Why we launched The Jones Network

Imagine a world where insurance compliance is not a thing anymore.

A corporate office needs urgent repair and maintenance: The property management team googles an approved vendor and schedules the work order. Easy!

A construction company is pre-qualifying subcontractors: The project team receives bids and all insurance certificates are compliant in advance. Done!

Scheduling, approval, compliance – everything is instant. That way your managers, vendors, and supervisors all go about their day.

Back to reality – “instant” is not how things work today.

You need to verify insurance compliance for every project, property and transaction in the built world. And this process, well, sucks.

Your team keeps chasing certificates of insurance (COIs) day after day. They typically use email. Maybe they use a spreadsheet. Perhaps they use a COI tracker that does things a bit faster.

But still, projects and payments get delayed, approvals take weeks, and managers waste hundreds of hours juggling COIs.

Why Does The Process Suck?

It all starts with a siloed manual workflow. Every building and construction site across the country runs their COI approvals locally for every tenant, vendor and/or subcontractor.

How siloed insurance compliance process works

How the siloed insurance compliance process works

There is a good reason and a bad reason for this workflow.

The good reason is that each location has unique insurance requirements that are tied to the owner’s risk appetite. That’s logical.

The bad reason is that management teams are responsible for COI approvals, but in reality they are untrained in insurance, they make mistakes all the time, and they simply hate it (read: nobody got promoted for being a great COI manager).

This leaves a lot to be desired – vendors get denied entry, subs get denied payment, and projects get delayed for weeks.

Adding insult to injury, this process is repeated in different ways across millions of properties and construction sites every day. Yes, it’s that bad.

Why Should We Actually Fix It?

Before Jones, I struggled with insurance certificates for years as a sales manager in real estate. I despised the compliance process and started a company to fix it.

So, my co-founder and I came together to build software that made insurance compliance bearable for our clients.

We made approvals 2x faster, we made the user experience super simple, and we integrated the tool with major ERP systems such as Procore, MRI, Yardi and others.

But this only took us so far. Our software was a painkiller, not a total cure.

We never stopped thinking about how to fix what makes insurance compliance broken at the core – the local siloed approach.

But what if you had global access to the insurance profile of any tenant, vendor, and subcontractor at your fingertips?

What if you could predict anybody’s compliance rate in order to make smarter, quicker procurement decisions?

What if you could distribute insurance data to any stakeholder – tenant, owner, manager – all with a click of a button?

Imagine one system that aggregates all the world’s insurance data and distributes it across any transaction in the built world.

That’s what we’ve built. We call it The Jones Network.

What is The Jones Network?

It is all the insurance coverage information you will ever need – collected, reviewed, and stored in one system to benefit everyone.

The Jones Network enables users to access relevant data that is sourced from across our ecosystem of buildings and construction sites that run on Jones every day. The more customers we add to our network, the better it gets for everyone.

We placed software applications at the center of the network, so that you can leverage the insurance data to run seamless compliance transactions – tenant leases, subcontractor pre-qualification, vendor procurement, payments – anything.

Think of it like a Linkedin for insurance compliance in the built world.

Sound awesome? It is! Here’s how it works:

  • Leverage existing insurance data to end the collection nightmare
  • Access dynamic contact information to source insurance documents directly (company, broker or agent)
  • Standardize the resolution of insurance gaps with global requirements
  • Optimize insurance requirements based on industry-wide benchmarks
How centralized insurance compliance process works

How the centralized insurance compliance process works

Related: How to Look Up Insurance Coverage For Any Vendor Or Subcontractor On The Jones Network

How Does The Jones Network Get The Job Done?

The architect of disruptive innovation, Professor Clay Christensen, said that milkshakes are excellent products not because they taste good, but because consumers need a nourishing drink that sips slowly during their boring commute to work.

In other words, milkshakes get the job done far better than coffee, bananas, and others.

In a similar fashion, The Jones Network helps real estate managers get their jobs done more effectively than any other tool on the market.

The jobs-to-be-done:

  • Skip the headache of collecting insurance certificates altogether
  • Vet vendors and see how likely they are to be compliant before hiring them
  • Give tenants control over compliance to improve their procurement decisions
  • Hire vendors and subcontractors rapidly for urgent projects
  • Improve time-to-hire by transacting with pre-approved vendors
  • Reduce liability by using existing insurance profiles, documents and contact info

How Does The Jones Network Transform Your Business?

Proptech has made big promises to real estate for almost a decade. Now more than ever is the time to deliver.

The economic climate has brought about a paradigm shift. Insurance premiums are rising, tenants demand seamless experiences, and budgets have tightened dramatically.

As you examine what impact the insurance compliance process has on the bottom line, the conclusions are, oftentimes, very disappointing.

With the Jones Network, you can make better procurement decisions by having the intelligence in advance to know how likely your vendors and subcontractors will be compliant.

You can finally deliver on the demanding expectations of commercial tenants who need to get vendors approved ASAP. Even better, you can offer tenants a pre-approved vendor network that lets them skip the compliance process altogether.

In a world of rising premiums, The Jones Network will give you dependable, data-driven confidence that project and property managers are making error-free decisions that protect your company from claims.

If your employees spend thousands of hours on insurance compliance, The Jones Network allows you to reduce that unnecessary workload, saving countless hours and reallocating the team to truly high-value tasks.

In other words, it is time we held proptech to the same standard as that of the real estate and construction industries.

The Jones Network will cut operational costs by radically improving processes rather than just optimizing them, integrating with core systems and moving your organization towards data transparency.

We will of course still provide the same software you have come to expect to simplify and automate insurance compliance. Better yet, now the software is powered by a network of tens of thousands of vendors and their verified insurance data that is analyzed by AI and accessible to every stakeholder across your company.

It is the time to give the industry — and management teams that propel it forward — a compliance solution that actually makes sense!

Ready to learn more about The Jones Network?

Let’s Chat!