Insurance agencies and producers depend on commissions from insurance carrier policies to pay the bills. As most agencies know, the road to earning those commissions comes with a slight but all-to-common speed bump: insurance carrier commission statements. Luckily, we here at Core Commissions have a solution for you
Insurance commission statements can take up room and eat up time and resources too.
What’s Wrong with Insurance Commission Statements?
They detail out new policy payments, renewals, and how commissions breakdown for each. This information is meant to help agencies determine how much money they have to pay the bills as well as what commissions need to be distributed to producers. It’s just not always as easy as it sounds.
Commission statements dispensed by carriers often come with challenges. From inconsistent file formats to missing information and hard-to-read text, the documents themselves are just difficult to deal with. Then comes converting these documents from their many forms into data that can be ingested into commissions calculations. That eats up so much time before an administrator even has a chance to generate calculations.
We’ve outlined just a few of the challenges administrators experience with insurance commission statements on a regular basis.
Commission Statement Challenges:
- File Format Inconsistency: Carrier statements come in all sorts of file types. Carriers use paper, TSV, PDF, and an assortment of other file types. For agencies working with numerous carriers, this inconsistency can be a real problem when it comes to actually sitting down and sorting through those various file types. The administrator (or whoever handles commissions for the company) has to quickly shift back and forth between electronic and paper types and keep all those numbers straight in the process.
- Every Carrier Does It Differently: Not only do the file types vary but the way in which a carrier actually organizes the information in a statement fluctuates quite a bit. In the middle of swiveling between various file formats, the administrator also needs to navigate a new configuration with each new statement. This can cause confusion when trying to unify data into a single document.
- Formats Change Without Notice: We’ve experienced this first hand. From time to time, a carrier will simply change their file format or document configuration without notice or explanation, leaving administrators to figure out an entirely new statement from square one. It’s frustrating, to say the least, but can certainly cause a level of confusion and ultimately result in errors in commission distributions.
- Missing Information: The statements insurance agencies receive aren’t always complete. Receiving details, like paid date, customer name, or policy number may be incomplete, leaving an administrator high and dry while trying to determine who and where a commission distribution needs to go. These omissions often require an administrator to circle back with the carrier and await additional information before moving on.
- Difficult to Read: Both PDF and paper documents can show up with major defects that prevent even an experienced administrator from fully deciphering the letters and numbers on the page. These issues can be caused by poor scans, small fonts, or lines disappearing or not lining up properly on the document.
- Time-Intensive Tasks: Even when every detail printed on a statement is easy to read, administrators still spend hours poring through the documents to pull data and convert it into something they can calculate through their commission systems. Depending on the volume of statements received on a regular basis and how often commissions are cycled, this could require a lot of time for a commission administrator who could spend their resources performing other, more productive tasks.
Once these insurance commission statements are finally converted for the purposes of commission calculations, a commission administrator still has an awful lot of work to do before the job is done. That’s why we think it’s wise to get a hand with this part of the job, especially.
How Core Can Help:
Our experienced team of administrators knows their way around an insurance commission statement. They’ve seen it all and they know how to handle it.
When insurance agencies subscribe to Core Commissions Managed Services package, they get instant access to this team who can take over commission statement conversion for them. As a bonus, we maintain records of carrier statements and data for all of our clients to allow for easy audits and reviews. If a statement from a particular carrier is missing one month, we can alert you.
We’d be happy to take commission statement conversions off your hands. Contact us for more information or schedule a free demo so we can show you just how easy we can make this process.