Commission visibility after AEP and OEP breaks first because selling creates volume, and volume creates questions. Your team can handle a busy enrollment season. The strain hits later, when payouts lag, agent messages stack up, and finance gets dragged into status checks.
AEP runs October 15 to December 7 and changes typically take effect January 1.
Marketplace OEP typically runs from November 1 through January 15.
Different timelines, same outcome: commissions turn into the first operational fire.
Why sales holds up, but commissions crack
Your sales process has structure:
- A start and end date
- Clear steps and scripts
- Tools that support quoting and enrollment
- Momentum and urgency
Commission work is the opposite:
- Multiple carrier files
- Different timing by carrier, product, and state
- Changing hierarchies and splits
- Corrections, reversals, and chargebacks
- Internal handoffs between ops, finance, and leadership
Sales ends on a calendar. Commission cleanup starts the next day.
The first thing that breaks: status clarity
The earliest pain rarely looks like “our commissions are wrong.”
It looks like:
- “Do you know where my payment is?”
- “Did this policy get paid yet?”
- “What am I getting on this book?”
- “Is my upline split correct?”
If your team can’t answer quickly, people assume the worst. Even when the numbers end up right, the lack of status drives friction.
The hidden cost
Every “quick question” pulls someone off real work:
- Ops scrambles through files
- Finance cross-checks statements
- Managers ask for updates
- Agents follow up again because nothing feels final
You don’t lose hours on calculations. You lose hours on explaining.
Why spreadsheets work during enrollment and fail after it
Spreadsheets feel fine during AEP and OEP because the job is simple:
- Track what was sold
- Track what was submitted
- Track what should pay
After enrollment, the job changes:
- Track what actually paid
- Track timing and status
- Handle exceptions, corrections, and missing items
- Explain outcomes to multiple stakeholders
Spreadsheets struggle because they rely on three things that disappear post-season:
- One owner
- One version of the truth
- One consistent input format
Once the “what happened to my commission?” questions start, your sheet becomes a support desk.
What breaks next: the org chart
Post-enrollment exposes every hierarchy problem you postponed.
Common triggers:
- New agents added late in the season
- Upline changes not reflected in your tracking
- Split agreements living in email threads
- Overrides handled “case by case”
This is why “we already have something” often isn’t true. Many agencies have a process. Few have reliable hierarchy logic when volume hits.
Carrier statements don’t solve the real problem
Carrier statements matter, but they don’t answer the question your agency gets all day:
“Where does this stand right now?”
Statements typically arrive after the fact. Agencies still need:
- A single view of payment status across carriers
- A clean breakdown by agent and hierarchy
- A fast way to respond when someone asks today, not next week
When you rely on “just wait for the carrier,” you train your agency to accept uncertainty as normal. That’s a culture problem, not a data problem.
The finance trap: “Finance handles it”
Finance can handle the math.
Finance should not have to run support.
After AEP/OEP, finance gets pulled into:
- Status checks
- Dispute mediation
- Re-sending reports
- Explaining why a payout differs from expectations
That’s expensive time.
If your process depends on finance to answer routine agent questions, you built a bottleneck.
The simplest diagnostic
Ask this internally:
How much time does your team spend answering commission questions today?
If the answer is “more than we like,” you don’t need a new spreadsheet. You need better commission visibility.
What “good” looks like after AEP/OEP
Agencies that stay calm in January (and after AEP & OEP) usually have three things:
1. Self-serve visibility for agents
Agents can check their own commission details and status without routing everything through your team.
2. One system of record
Your team stops reconciling five versions of the truth across:
- emails
- shared drives
- spreadsheets
- carrier portals
- vendor reports
3. A repeatable hierarchy setup
You can update uplines, splits, and structures without rebuilding your process every season.
This is the difference between “commission tracking” and commission operations.
Where Comissio fits
Comissio isn’t about changing how you sell.
It’s about what happens after AEP and OEP when:
- questions increase
- payouts roll in on different schedules
- manual tracking starts to break
- your team becomes the help desk
Comissio gives agencies a centralized way to manage commission visibility so agents and internal teams stop guessing and start checking.
If you want a clean starting point, keep it simple:
- One short conversation
- One workflow walkthrough
- Confirm fit before you change anything
What to do next: a post-enrollment cleanup plan
If commissions feel messy right now, do these in order:
- List your top 10 commission questions from the last 2 weeks
- Track where answers come from (carrier, spreadsheet, finance, ops)
- Flag every manual step required to answer “where does this stand?”
- Identify hierarchy risks (uplines, splits, overrides)
- Decide what must become self-serve for agents
That list becomes your requirements. It also tells you if software will actually help.
For many agencies, that’s where Comissio fits. It gives you a centralized way to manage commission visibility after AEP and OEP so agents can check status themselves and your team can stop chasing answers across spreadsheets, carrier portals, and email threads. If it’s helpful, a short conversation is often the easiest way to see if Comissio applies to your agency.
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