Keeping COIs, W-9s, and licenses up to date takes more time than vendors expect

A certificate of insurance expires. A license needs renewing. A new client asks for a W-9 you've already sent to five other clients this year. None of it is hard, exactly. It's just constant, and constant adds up in ways a single paperwork deadline never does.

How much time it actually takes

Most vendors land somewhere in the middle. 33.6% spend 1 to 3 hours a month keeping compliance documents current, and 29.0% spend 4 to 8 hours. On the low end, 25.7% get through it in under an hour. On the high end, a real minority spends far more: 11.7% of vendors, nearly 1 in 8, spend 9 or more hours a month on this alone.

That top group isn't a rounding error. Nine or more hours a month on paperwork is more than a full workday, every month, spent on documents that don't generate a single invoice.

Why it scales with how many clients you manage

Compliance time isn't evenly distributed, and it isn't random. It tracks closely with how many portals and platforms a vendor logs into. Vendors who manage zero portals report the lightest load by far: 68.8% spend under an hour a month on compliance. That share drops to 29.5% for vendors juggling 1 to 2 portals, and falls off a cliff at 3 to 5 portals, where only 8.7% spend under an hour. Vendors managing 6 or more portals are two to four times more likely than the average vendor to spend 9 or more hours a month on compliance paperwork alone. (The 11-to-20 and 20-plus portal groups are small samples, 9 respondents each, so treat those two data points as directional rather than precise.)

The pattern makes sense once you think about what a portal actually requires. Each new client relationship usually means resubmitting the same COI, the same W-9, the same license number, into a different system, in a different format, on a different renewal schedule. The document doesn't change. The number of places it has to live does.

It's not the paperwork. It's the repetition.

A single compliance document isn't the problem. Filling out one W-9 takes minutes. The cost comes from doing it again for every client, tracking a different expiration date for every certificate, and repeating the process every time a portal asks for it in its own format. That's what makes this kind of admin work easy to underestimate: no single task is big enough to notice, but the total adds up to real hours every month, for vendors who'd rather be doing the job they're actually paid for.

This finding is one piece of a larger picture. Our 2026 Vendor Payment & Portal Report looked at how 417 vendors handle payments, portals, and compliance overall, and the report recap, link to hub article pulls together what stood out most across all of it.