Running an insurance agency is challenging enough – juggling ever-changing carrier policies, ensuring payments are accurate and received on time, bringing in new business, renewing existing policies, and maintaining strong client relationships, all while keeping day-to-day operations on track. With so much already on your plate, the last thing you have time or mental capacity for is managing something as complex and time-consuming as commission payments.
Insurance commissions are notably complex, and when your organization is already overburdened with other administrative tasks, it’s important to consider outsourcing commission-related tasks as a more cost-effective and efficient solution. If any of the following signs sound familiar, it’s time to automate your commission processes with Managed Services.
If your organization still relies on spreadsheets as the primary tool for managing commission payments, you’re not just increasing the risk of errors – you’re also adding significant, unnecessary hours to your workload. While spreadsheets may seem like a cost-effective and flexible option for organizing your data and calculating commission payments, it ends up coming with a steep price in terms of time and efficiency.
The reality is that managing commissions in spreadsheets requires countless hours spent tracking, updating, and reconciling data across multiple files. When you factor in the man-hours spent maintaining and consolidating spreadsheets, the supposed cost savings quickly disappear. In fact, the labor costs and risk of mistakes often make spreadsheet-based commission management more expensive in the long run.
Core’s flexible platform is built to simplify data management. With comprehensive integration options, you can automatically sync data from multiple sources into Core for a single, consolidated source of truth. Part of our Managed Services include data conversion and consolidation, so regardless of whether your data comes from disparate applications, scanned files from carriers, or a thousand-rowed spreadsheet – we can help you get your data organized and your business on track.
Even small mistakes in commission calculations can lead to widespread issues. From navigating disputes with insurance agents, reconciling past reports to find and correct errors, and in the worst-case scenarios – issues verging on wage law non-compliance – every error will carry an unexpected business cost. The biggest source of errors? Manual processes.
For employees that have their entire paycheck built off of incentive earnings, they pay very close attention to the details of their pay, making accuracy of the utmost importance when it comes to processing commission payments.
As a Managed Service provider, Core uses an array of automation tools to complete tasks that you would otherwise have to perform manually. With an expertly trained support team, Core can work with you to streamline manual processes, thereby cutting your workload by as much as 80% while improving accuracy and eliminating costly errors.
Think about how much time it takes to gather data from all your carriers. Each carrier operates differently and follows its own process for providing statements. Despite advancements in automation and AI, many still send printed statements. Others may require you to log into an online portal to download them, while some email individual statements that you then have to manually consolidate at the end of the month.
And once you have all of the carrier statements, how long does it take to reconcile and attach revenue to the appropriate agent? For many agencies, gathering and inputting data from carrier statements can be the most time-consuming part of the entire commission process.
Every hour that your administrative team works to process carrier statements is an added cost that impacts your bottom line without adding any value to the company. So, if your team is scrambling to download statements – or worse – buried under a physical paper stack of carrier statements, it is a big red flag that you need to outsource this task to an expert who can automate this.
As your agency grows, the volume of transactions and complexity of commission plans can quickly outpace your internal resources. Even for smaller agencies, working with multiple carriers and offering a wide range of policy options adds layers of complexity to compensation structures. Automation is essential for scaling efficiently, and outsourcing complex, manual workflows allows you to keep pace with growth – without the added costs of hiring more administrative staff or the risk of operational bottlenecks.
Core provides a variety of Managed Service offerings, even working directly with agencies to help identify potential bottlenecks or operational processes that can be automated. Services can be fully customized to meet your company’s unique needs. If you don’t see a service listed, we encourage you to reach out for a personalized quote.
Reports are the crux to making informed business decisions. They give visibility to every level of the organization – from executives monitoring profitability and carrier relationships to producers tracking customer policy renewals and commissions payments.
For agency owners and leadership, reports like revenue summaries, profit and loss statements, and reconciliation reports provide insight into the business’s finances and ensure carrier payments are properly collected and distributed. For agents and account managers, access to detailed reports showing active clients, policies nearing renewal, top-performing carriers, and commission breakdowns is essential for maintaining strong customer relationships and identifying patterns for improving sales performance..
However, creating these reports through spreadsheets is time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult to maintain when producing individual reports for each agent as well as overall business reports for leadership teams. With data spread across multiple carriers, management systems, and payment files, manual reporting requires constant updates and cross-checking, which open the door to mistakes and, therefore, inaccurate information to work with.
Core’s platform has a full suite of off-the-shelf reports that cater to both leadership and individual employees alike. Additionally, Core’s online portal gives you the option to provide individual logins for team members to login themselves to see their sale details themselves.
The bottom line: the administrative work that goes on behind the scenes of an insurance agency can be tedious and time-consuming enough without adding the cumbersome workload of managing incentive payments. The clear solution to removing the burden of these administrative tasks is to outsource it to a professional.
Core Commissions has a full team of incentive compensation experts dedicated to providing full-service commission management.
Contact Core Commissions for a customized quote on Managed Services and leave the commissions to us.