Month end in the broker accounts team
Statements arrive from each insurer you trade with. Some are PDFs, some are spreadsheets, some come from a portal download. Each lists the transactions the insurer thinks are due: new business, renewals, adjustments, cancellations, each with a gross premium, commission and net amount. Your broking system has its own view of the same transactions.
The accounts team goes through each statement, ticking lines against the ledger. Most match. Then there is the adjustment the insurer processed but you did not, the cancellation you processed but the insurer has not, the policy number with a different suffix, the commission rate that does not agree. Each one means a search, an email and a note.
Why the two sides never quite agree
The insurer and the broker record the same events at different times and in different ways. References differ. An adjustment may be one line on your side and two on theirs. Commission may be calculated on a different base. Statement formats vary by insurer and sometimes by product, so there is no single import.
The upshot is that a person does a comparison that a computer could do for the plain cases, and spends most of their time on the plain cases rather than the differences.
What slow reconciliation holds up
- Payments to insurers wait on the reconciliation, and aged items pile up.
- Differences found late are harder to resolve, because the handler has forgotten the case.
- Month end takes longer than it should, every month.
- Commission differences go unchallenged because there is no time.
- Your own finance and compliance people get a less clear view of what is owed and to whom.
How client money and insurer money are held and reported is set by your own procedures and your accountants. What we build is a faster way to do the matching those procedures already require.
Matching that does the plain cases
- Each insurer's statement format is read, whether PDF, spreadsheet or portal export, and turned into a common structure.
- Your transactions are read from your broking system, through its API or a scheduled report.
- Lines are paired on policy number, transaction type, amount and date, with rules for the known quirks, such as reference suffixes or split adjustments.
- Exact matches are marked as agreed for a person to confirm in bulk.
- Near matches are shown with the reason, such as a commission difference or a date outside the period.
- Unmatched lines on either side go into a queue with a suggested cause: not yet processed by us, not yet processed by the insurer, or unknown.
- Queries to insurers and to handlers are drafted from the queue, and the outcome of each is recorded.
- A reconciliation report per insurer is produced for your records.
Where the team's time goes afterwards
| Type of line | Handled by | Today |
|---|---|---|
| Exact match | Automatic pairing, bulk confirmation | Ticked by hand |
| Commission difference | Queue, with both rates shown | Found by chance |
| Missing on our side | Queue, handler asked to process | Found by search |
| Missing on insurer side | Query drafted to insurer | Found by search |
The accounts team works on the queue of differences, which is the part that needs their knowledge. The reconciliation is also more regular, because it is not a week-long job each time.
Handlers notice the change too. Instead of a batch of queries about cases from two months ago, they get a short request about something from last week, while they still remember it. And when an insurer asks why an item is outstanding, the queue already shows who is dealing with it and what was said.
Does this describe your month end?
- Insurer statements are ticked off by hand against the ledger.
- Each insurer's statement format needs its own routine.
- Aged unreconciled items keep growing.
- Commission differences are rarely challenged.