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A roofing crew is already on the building. The COI isn’t. License, current insurance, and additional insured — before the first nail.

The truck is in the lot. The ladder’s on the stucco. Work has started and nobody pulled this week’s certificate of insurance. Last year’s PDF is still buried in someone’s email. Then someone slips, water finds the unit below, or a claim hits the master policy. The vendor’s coverage lapsed. The association was never additional insured. The crew showed up. The paper didn’t.

This HOA Case Files episode is for condo and HOA boards that manage vendors: why “certificate holder” is not the same as coverage, the three checks to require before any trade starts (license, current COI with general liability and workers’ comp where required, and additional insured for higher-risk jobs), and how to write that rule once so the parking-lot exception stops winning. Practical, plain-language vendor paperwork for self-managed boards — not a lecture, not legal advice. Confirm with your bylaws, association counsel, and insurance broker.

Topics: HOA vendor insurance, certificate of insurance (COI), additional insured vs certificate holder, workers’ compensation for contractors, board vendor policy, condo association risk, self-managed HOA operations.

From SoShiny.com. New case every week. We are not your attorney.

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A propane barbecue on a first-floor balcony. A written rule about grills. A six-alarm fire that gutted Spinnaker Cove in Foster City — about 51 units, more than 150 residents displaced, building red-tagged and a total loss. Four firefighters injured.

Public reporting: investigators initially pointed to an unattended grill; a resident was arrested; San Mateo County prosecutors later dropped criminal charges after the official cause was ruled undetermined. Accused, not convicted. Civil questions may still exist. We are not retrying anyone on a microphone.

This week’s case file asks the volunteer-board questions: what a rule on paper is worth when the building does not survive; what it costs when enforcement is theater; what you risk if the next grill night is “someone else’s problem.” Cost. Risk. Whether the fight — posting the rule, enforcing it, documenting it — is worth it before the smoke.

Homework at the end. Bring the popcorn.

HOA Case Files, from SoShiny.com. New case every week. We are not your attorney.

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The AI wrote our draft minutes in nine seconds.

Case file #4 follows three volunteer secretaries in three states running three different transcription tools.

• Dana in Daytona Beach uses Notion, which builds the board's action list on its own and then goes vague on who said what.
• Ray in Fort Worth carries a PLAUD recorder and names every speaker after the meeting ends.
• Grace in Anaheim runs Zoom, where the login does the naming for her, right up until the clubhouse joins on one shared iPad and eight people become one person.

All three cut minutes work from three hours to about 30 minutes. All three got the vote count right and the names wrong on the first try but caught AI's mistake. In minutes, the names are the whole point.

We debate the microphone, the chair's script, the four things AI still cannot do, and the question nobody asks until a lawyer does: what happens to the recording?

Homework at the end. Bring the popcorn.

HOA Case Files, from SoShiny.com. New case every week.