As insurance agencies grow, one of the biggest operational bottlenecks they face is manually processing carrier statements.
Not only does every carrier deliver statements differently – with some physically mailing statements, some emailing PDFs, and others may require you to login to their web portal to download the statements yourself – there is absolutely no standardization for carrier statement formatting. So, after the hours spent gathering all of the statements you need to reconcile your book of business and begin to start processing payroll, you now need to take the time to go through each line item to consolidate the figures.
This process – which is so critical to the agency’s finances – leaves a lot of room for errors.
No matter how much you try to streamline this process by introducing check lists or spreadsheets for tracking, there is still always a potential for things to get overlooked or data to get keyed incorrectly.
The best way to add efficiency to a completely inefficient process is through automation, and automation ensures that you’re prepared to scale business operations at the drop of a hat.
The Hidden Costs of Manual Carrier Statement Management
1. Carrier Statement Management is a Time-Suck that Consumes Hours of Administrative Labor Every Month
Hours spent manually interpreting and entering data from carrier statements add up quickly. Some insurance agencies report spending up to 40 hours per month just on carrier statement management. An entire week completely wasted on a tedious task that no one wants to do.
As carriers add pages, policy types, new rate structures, the workload only grows and worsens.
Does your agency really have the time to spare to handle this? Or the finances to fully fund a full-time employee to manage it? The labor involved in carrier statement management is a huge cost.
2. Manual Carrier Statement Processing Increases the Potential for Errors in Your Book of Business and on Your Agent Payouts
Every time manual data entry is involved, there is an increased chance for errors. In fact, various studies over the years have shown that as many as 94% of spreadsheets contain errors, making it extremely likely that some of the spreadsheets that you are using right now could contain errors that will impact your commission payments.
One miss-keyed figure can trigger a cascade of downstream problems from missing policy data, misapplied agent splits, to undetected underpayments from carriers. Without automated tools for auditing and reconciling payments, it may take months before the errors are identified – if they are found at all – and then the work to go and correct the problem becomes a massive, time-consuming effort that requires you re-run previously closed commission periods.
The process of identifying and resolving errors is costly.
3. You Can Not Scale Your Business with Fragmented Data
When your agency is juggling spreadsheets, email attachments, and tons of manual data entry – everything starts to slow down. Reports don’t line up, reconciliation drags on longer than it should, and month-end payouts turn into a scramble. All that fragmented data makes it tough to move quickly, support your agents, or confidently grow your downline. You will never be prepared to scale your business when your information is scattered everywhere, making fragmented data an unexpected cost to your business.es of what the calculations might look like.
Adding Efficiency to Carrier Statement Management with Automation
Your check list for carrier statement management might look something like this;
- Gather statements from carriers
- Scan and file paper copies
- Key in numbers into a master spreadsheet
- Clean and consolidate data to total figures for the month
- Reconcile payments to ensure the checks received match what you are owed
With each step in this multi-part process taking hours of administrative time, Core Commissions steps in to provide end-to-end automation. Here’s what that looks like:
1. Auditing Tools to Ensure You Have All Necessary Data for Commission Processing
In Core’s system, your carrier data will be added as “Datasources”. These Datasources are what will eventually be used to calculate your commission payments, and with built-in auditing for each Datasource, you will get notified any time there is missing data for your commission pay period. The system will let you know before you even begin processing if there is expected data that is being omitted, so you never have to worry about unaccounted data.
2. Converting Carrier Statements to Streamline Formatting Standardization
Core Commissions offers an extensive list of outsourcing options – including carrier statement management – to free up your administrative workload for a fraction of the cost of hiring additional support staff. Send your carrier statements directly to Core and we’ll convert the documents for you, so you can skip this step entirely.
3. Robust Rules Engine that Maps Agents to Policies Automatically
Core’s rules engine makes mapping agents to policies effortless. Instead of sorting through spreadsheets or trying to remember which agent is tied to which policy, the system automatically applies your predetermined rules – such as who’s the writing agent, who gets overrides, or which products follow which payout structure – and matches every policy to the right person instantly.
4. Data Management Tools to Edit and Consolidate Data
Commissions are hardly ever black and white, and you likely have to make adjustments to your data every pay cycle. Core’s Data Management tools allow you to make bulk edits or adjustments to data in just a few clicks. Whether you need to clean records, merge duplicate data sets, update agent assignments, or make big changes across multiple policies, you can do this all with fully automated tools and without any manual manipulation.
5. Reporting Features to Reconcile Expected Payments vs. Received Payments
After all your carrier statements have been consolidated and payments have been totaled, you can use Core’s library of off-the-shelf reports to instantly reconcile the payments that you have received from each carrier vs how much you should have received. You can’t always count on carriers to get it right – and if you are underpaid for policies sold, you need to immediately isolate the error in order to correct it with the carrier.
Scale Your Agency with Automated Carrier Statement Management
Agencies often assume that more business requires more administrative staff, but by automating manual and time-consuming business operations such as carrier statement management, you can support more carriers, agents, and policies – without increasing payroll.
Manual carrier statement processing is a roadblock that will limit your agency’s ability to grow effectively. Core offers a scalable solution that provides end-to-end automation that will transform your processes for carrier statement management, commission calculations, and monthly reporting.
Schedule a demo to see firsthand how Core’s portal can turn your agency’s biggest pain points into a fully automated workflow.