If your insurance agency is currently growing, you’re likely being hit by ever-changing rates, policies, and carriers—a recipe for commission tracking nightmares and data management chaos. What not all agency leaders realize is that an insurance commission tracker is a secret weapon that can simplify commission tracking, cut out manual errors, make chargebacks easy, and save time—all without extra reliance on IT.
And there may be even more benefits to embracing this technology than you realize. In this article, we lay out the top reasons your agency needs a boost from an insurance commission tracker.
Does Your Agency Need an Insurance Commission Tracker?
If your insurance agency is tracking commission by hand, it’s more than just a management hassle. It could be causing mistakes and costing the agency money. According to an Xactly report, only two thirds of sales teams say their compensation program always pays everyone accurately. Worse yet, the same report found that 83 percent of companies have payment inaccuracies in their commission programs.
Automated insurance commission trackers can help insurance agencies avoid inaccuracies, organize commission management, and increase profit. Whether you’re manually managing commission or relying on disjointed commission tools, here are six reasons to make the move to an insurance commission tracker:
1. Growth is Wrecking Insurance Commission Runs
Manual commission tracking may make sense when an agency only has a few insurance policies and carriers. However, if your agency is growing, that growth can make tracking commission nearly impossible. Attempting to properly track different insurance lines, policies, and carriers by hand can waste hours when the business grows.
This challenge isn’t confined to fast or unexpected growth. Even small moves can completely throw off insurance commission runs. For instance, imagine that your agency already sells health insurance to people under the age of 65, but now you want to add Medicare. That move alone could throw off commission calculations and hierarchies.
Insurance commission trackers account for growth and changes by automatically calculating commission and adjusting hierarchies. This software sorts through insurance lines, policies, and carriers for you—cutting down errors and saving your agency time.
2. Multiple Processes and Systems Can Be a Mess
No matter how organized your team is, when it comes to managing commission, it’s easy for processes to become jumbled. Those processes, when jumbled, become even worse when you’re hopping from program to program and trying to track multiple carriers in multiple systems.
However, an advanced insurance commission tracker will organize all of your carrier information in one place. That way, you can handle and improve all of your processes on a single, clear platform. Advanced insurance commission trackers will also let you reconcile for individual carriers as well as process commissions for different carrier combinations—from single or multiple carriers to new business, recurring business, or all scenarios at once.
3. It’s Time to Eliminate Chargeback Nightmares
If you’re managing chargebacks manually or using a program that’s not specifically built for the insurance industry, it could be damaging your agency’s bottom line and turning clients away. Here are a few ways advanced insurance commission tracking software simplifies chargebacks:
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- Easy reporting: Software lets you report on the complete dollar value of chargebacks within a cycle and factor in adjustments. Some advanced programs will even allow you to sort, filter, and expand details by plan type, carrier, or representative.
- Chargeback recovery features: Some insurance commission trackers include early cancellation processors to make it easy to recover funds quickly.
- Simple commission management: Insurance commission software that includes adjustment calculators makes it possible to easily increase or decrease 1099 and W2 balances for agents, including debit balances and net commissions.
4. Reactive Commission Calculations Are Holding You Back
Most agencies take a reactive approach to calculating commissions. Unfortunately, reacting to commission numbers as they trickle in can lead to drawn out processes and delayed end-of-month reporting. It simply takes longer to input data in the moment and by hand.
Insurance commission tracking software lets you calculate commissions in advance. You can also automate agent payments and set up monthly, quarterly, and annual payment schedules. Plus, advanced software will allow you to set up custom pay codes for any commission that’s either paid out or earned in advance. As a result, your agency can speed up processes, save time, and improve relationships with both agents and clients.
5. Insurance Agencies Need to Organize Hierarchies
If you’re part of a growing agency, you likely shudder at the thought of managing commission hierarchies. Not organizing hierarchies properly can eat into your day and end up costing your agency and team members money in the long run.
Insurance commission tracking software organizes commission hierarchies for you, and allows you to easily sort through and track commissions by position and contracts. Additionally, some software includes dashboards that make it easy to track key performance indicators (KPIs) and monitor recovery for commission advances.
6. You Can Save Time and Money with Insurance Commission Automation
Not all insurance agencies realize it, but pulling commission reports, searching for information by hand, and manually inputting data wastes massive amounts of time and money. In fact, research done by Alteryx found that some advanced spreadsheet users waste as many as nine hours every week updating sheets and conducting repetitive input tasks.
Insurance commission software automates processes and cuts out manual document management. Advanced programs make it easy to import and export files without having to pull information from sheets or other programs. This eliminates the need to scramble and sort through files—saving money and freeing up agency pros to focus on refining processes for more profit.
Find the Best Insurance Commission Tracker for Your Agency
An insurance commission tracker can save your agency time, money, and massive headaches. However, not all insurance commission trackers will provide your agency with the same results. Download our Vendor Comparison Guide now to see what commission tracking software includes the features your agency needs.
