Sales Enablement
What does manual COI management actually cost you?
Built for businesses tracking incoming vendor COIs. Manual COI management is a recurring load on a compliance analyst: requesting documents, chasing the ones that do not arrive, checking them against your requirements, and running it again at renewal. This estimates that cost at your scale, with every assumption shown and adjustable.
Annual analyst hours on COIs
100 hrs
Hours recovered with automation
80 hrs
Annual value recovered
$4,800
That is 80 analyst hours back per year, roughly 2.0 full work weeks, redirected from chasing documents to actual risk work. It recurs every year and grows with your vendor base.
The number this does not show
~$43,000
One average work injury, per the National Safety Council. A single uncovered loss costs more than years of the labor savings above, and a passing certificate does not prevent it. The certificate confirms the paper arrived; it does not check whether the coverage actually fits the work.
How this is figured: 150 vendors × 40 analyst minutes per vendor per year ÷ 60 = 100 hours. Automation recovers 80% of that (myCOI's published figure). Recovered hours × $60 fully loaded = the annual value. Tool cost is not netted out; this is the cost of doing it by hand.
How this is calculated, and what it leaves out
The formula is direct: vendors × analyst minutes per vendor per year ÷ 60 = annual hours. The 40-minute default is the full lifecycle, not a single read: roughly 12 minutes to obtain the certificate (vendors rarely send without follow-up), 10 to check it against your requirements, 8 to remediate the ones that come back wrong, and 10 to re-request and re-check at renewal. Hours recovered is that figure times the automation efficiency gain, and the dollar value is recovered hours times the fully-loaded analyst rate. The 80% default is myCOI/illumend's own published claim, "80% Less Admin Time on COIs." It is their number, not one independently scoped to this lifecycle, so it is a slider you can lower.
"Fully-loaded" means wages plus benefits plus overhead, because an hour of staff time costs more than the wage line. What this model deliberately leaves out: the cost of a coverage gap that goes undetected, vendor onboarding friction, and audit findings from incomplete records, all of which push the number up, and the price of the tool itself, which it does not net out. This is the cost of doing the work by hand, not a net-of-software ROI.
The framing
TrustLayer says it themselves.
"Millions of these documents change hands every day and, again, thousands of phone calls are placed and handled just to verify that what they say is true. Costing us all time and money every step of the way."
The calculator above puts a number on "time and money" for any single business doing the verification work by hand.
Positioning
Labor is the floor. The avoided loss is the product.
The honest read on the calculator above: at a typical vendor count the savings are real but modest, and they do not clear most software pricing until you are tracking on the order of a thousand vendors. The temptation is to inflate the inputs until the number impresses. I left it honest, because the number was never the point.
The floor is the point, because it reveals what TrustLayer actually sells. This is not an efficiency product, it is risk transfer. One failed transfer, an uninsured subcontractor whose loss your own policy then absorbs, dwarfs every administrative hour on the page. Labor is the smallest lever in the category. The buyer was never buying time back. They are buying the loss they did not have to eat.
Which is why the ideal customer is defined by exposure, not headcount: construction, commercial real estate, lending, healthcare, the operators who depend on a thousand other companies' coverage, where a single gap is catastrophic.
So if I ran this inside TrustLayer, I would frame the calculator as exactly that, the floor. Before we count the claim you did not have to eat, here is what doing this by hand costs. It earns trust because it does not overreach, and it sets up the real conversation, which is risk, not minutes.