How do you fill out ACORD 25 certificates of insurance with Claude?

How to fill ACORD 25 certificates with Claude, step by step

1. Install the free ACORD 25 skill. Download the free ACORD 25 skill from this page and install it in Claude. The blank ACORD 25 form is built into the skill, so there is no fillable PDF to hunt down first.
2. Build a certificate holder spreadsheet. Put one row per certificate holder, with columns for the holder name, address, and anything that changes per holder such as the description of operations or whether additional insured and waiver of subrogation apply. Everything that is identical on every certificate stays out of the spreadsheet.
3. Give Claude your agency and insured information. Tell Claude the producer and agency details and the insured's information. You can paste it, type it, upload a declarations page, drop in a screenshot, or point Claude at your web-based agency management system in Chrome.
4. Answer the coverage questions. Claude asks a short set of targeted questions about the judgment calls that make a certificate right or wrong, including which coverage lines to show, occurrence versus claims-made, and whether the general aggregate applies per project. Answer from the policy, not from memory.
5. Let it run the batch. Claude fills one ACORD 25 per row and saves a separate PDF for each holder. In the demo this took four minutes for 20 certificates, from 7:01 PM to 7:05 PM.
6. Review every certificate before it goes out. Open the finished PDFs and confirm the carrier names, NAIC codes, policy numbers, dates, and limits match the policy. Confirm any additional insured or waiver of subrogation endorsement actually exists before it is marked Y. You are still the one issuing the certificate.

Why certificates of insurance are the right job to hand off first

Certificates are the most repetitive task in a service department. The insured is the same, the policies are the same, the limits are the same. What changes from one certificate to the next is the holder block and the description of operations, and that is usually it. So a batch of 20 certificates is 20 copies of the same form with two small differences each.

That shape is exactly what a computer should be doing. The work is not hard, it is just long, and the length is where mistakes come from. By certificate number 14 nobody is reading carefully anymore. Handing the repetition to Claude and spending the saved time reviewing the output is a better use of an afternoon than typing the same carrier name 20 times.

The spreadsheet is the whole trick

The batch works because of how the data is split. Anything identical on every certificate, meaning the insured, the carriers, the policy numbers, the effective and expiration dates, and the limits, gets told to Claude once. Anything that changes per holder goes in the spreadsheet, one row at a time.

In practice that means columns for the certificate holder name and address, the description of operations for that specific holder, and flags for whether additional insured and waiver of subrogation apply to that holder. Claude reads the sheet, holds the shared policy data constant, and walks the rows.

This is also why the output is not 20 identical PDFs with a name swapped. Box 34 changes on every single certificate, because the description of operations is the field that actually differs between a landlord, a general contractor, and a lender.

The questions Claude asks are the ones agents get wrong

Before it fills anything, the skill asks a short set of questions, and they are deliberately the judgment calls rather than the easy fields. Which coverage lines belong on this certificate. Occurrence or claims-made. Whether the general aggregate applies per policy, per project, or per location. On other lines it will ask about auto symbols, umbrella versus excess, and workers compensation officer exclusions.

It asks because these are the fields that turn a certificate into an errors and omissions problem. A certificate is a representation about a real policy, so the skill is built to never invent a policy number, a NAIC code, a limit, or a date. If something is missing after it asks, it leaves the field blank and tells you what was missing, because a blank field is safer than a confident wrong one.

The same rule governs additional insured and waiver of subrogation. Those default to N, and the skill asks you to confirm the endorsement actually exists on the policy before marking Y. The form's own notice says the policy has to be endorsed, and checking a box does not endorse anything.

Getting your real policy data in, and doing it on a free account

There is no single required format for the policy data. You can upload the declarations page as a PDF, paste a screenshot, type it out, hand over a Word document or an Excel file, or have Claude open your web-based agency management system in Chrome and read the policy from there. Whichever is fastest for how your agency already stores things is the right answer.

Producer and agency information is the one part worth saving permanently. That block is identical on every certificate your agency ever issues, so it goes into the skill once and stops being a question after that.

All of this runs on a free Claude account. The one setting worth changing before you start is the privacy setting covered near the end of the video, which controls whether your conversations can be used for training. Change it first, then start uploading client data.