The two documents a customer will ask your business for

Two requests come to every small business that works for other businesses, usually from someone in accounts payable, usually with a deadline attached: “Can you send us a W-9?” and “We need a certificate of insurance before you start.” Neither is hard. Both stall a job when you cannot find yours.

The W-9

A W-9 is a one-page IRS form on which you tell a customer your legal name, your business name if it is different, how your business is taxed, your address and your taxpayer identification number (your EIN, or your Social Security number if you have no EIN). The customer keeps it on file and uses it to send you a 1099 in January.

Who asks: any business that will pay you $600 or more in a year. Some ask before the first invoice, some in December when their own accountant is chasing them.

What to know:

• Fill it out once and keep the signed copy. The form does not expire. You send the same one to every customer until something on it changes.
• Use the EIN if you have one. It keeps your Social Security number off documents that sit in other people’s filing cabinets. An EIN is free from the IRS and takes ten minutes.
• The legal name has to match what the IRS has for that number. A mismatch is how you get a letter about backup withholding.
• You will be asked for it again. The same customer, a new accounts payable person, two years on.

The other side of the form: if you pay contractors, you are the one who has to collect a W-9 from each of them before you pay, because you owe them a 1099 in January. Collecting it after the fact is the single most common January scramble for a small business.

The certificate of insurance

A certificate of insurance, a COI, is a one-page summary of your business insurance issued by your insurer or agent. It lists the policies (general liability, and often workers’ compensation, auto or professional liability), the limits, the policy numbers and the dates, and names the customer as the certificate holder. Some customers also want to be named as an additional insured, which is a change to the policy itself, not just to the certificate.

Who asks: anyone who lets you onto their property or into their systems. General contractors, property managers, landlords, event venues, larger companies with a vendor onboarding process.

What to know:

• It comes from your agent, not from you. Ask, say who the holder is and whether they need additional insured status, and it usually arrives the same day. Many agents let you request one from a portal.
• It expires with the policy. A customer who asked in March will ask again the March after, and often a few weeks before, because their system flags it.
• Keep the ones you have been sent, too. If a subcontractor works for you, you want their certificate for the same reason your customer wants yours.
• The limits matter. A contract that requires $2 million in general liability when your policy carries $1 million is a conversation with your agent, not a certificate.

Sending one in a minute

The difference between a minute and a day is whether the current version is somewhere you can find it from your phone. The W-9 is easy: one PDF, kept where the accountant’s things are kept. The certificate is the one that goes stale, because a new one arrives every year and the old one looks the same.

In Thaw, both live on the business’s own page. The W-9 is filed under Business with your EIN sealed, so a search for the number finds it and nothing else. The certificate is filed as what it is, with its expiry pulled out and listed under Up next, so the renewal comes up before the customer’s system flags it, and the newest certificate is the one on top. Either one goes out as a share link with a passcode and a date it stops working, from the document page, without an attachment sitting in someone’s inbox for good.