Hard work is its own reward. But let’s be honest: Everyone also wants to get paid.

Applied Epic® Reporting can help you track everyone’s hard work and ensure accurate payment of commissions.

The two-part workshop Best Practices for Benefits Accounting in Epic demonstrates how to track commission agreements and utilize the data you want, where you want it. Among other valuable topics, Applied Solutions Specialists JC Mahan and Robert Maedgen show you strategies to identify variances between estimated commissions and the actual amounts you receive from employee Benefits carriers.

Measuring your variances and determining potential issues before they become troublesome can help you and your Benefits producers get the money you’ve earned.

Even better, Applied Epic can do the heavy lifting for you.

Part 1: Commission Agreements

In Best Practices for Benefits Accounting in Epic: Part 1, Mahan and Maedgen walk you through how and why to enter commission data into Epic.

Best practice is to build out Employee-level and Company-level commission agreements. On the Employee side, Epic can track and filter producer commission agreements for:

• Standard percentage commissions (e.g., 30%) and incentive-based commissions (e.g., up to 50%)
• Commission types based on date, premium, revenue and risk
• Open agreements and agreements with effective dates and ending dates

These data points help to avoid overlapping agreements and clarify payment arrangements with your producers.

The same level of detail is available on the carrier side, and once you input Company commission agreements, they can be applied to any Benefits policy at the line level to calculate the estimated commission.

You can also use Epic Reports to maintain these commission agreements year over year. For example, an Epic report can generate an activity 60 days before carrier agreements expire, so you are prompted to update commission details.

Part 2: Managing Payments

Best Practices for Benefits Accounting in Epic: Part 2 delivers strategies for managing your Benefits commission payments, including:

• Benefits transactions through manually recorded commissions and direct bill import
• Reconciliation reporting
• Generating broker compensation disclosure notices

The workshop details the process of entering direct bill commissions from carriers or manually recording commissions — and when it’s typically best to use each approach. You’ll learn tips for working with Excel files from carriers to import the data you need.

With the information entered, reconciliation reporting ensures you’re getting paid what you expect to get paid. The workshop covers three typical reports for employee Benefits brokers:

• A monthly audit report of policies without commissions received. Examining this data can help you catch missing commissions before it becomes problematic.
• A monthly book of business report highlighting the commissions you received.
• A quarterly policy report comparing billed amounts (posted transactions) with estimated monthly and annual commissions. Based on how many months the policy has been in effect, this report shows the variance between the commission amount received vs. what was expected.

Applied Epic also makes it easier to satisfy broker compensation disclosure requirements and provide essential data to your clients. You can import a Word document with a template attachment for your broker compensation disclosure notice to your Applied Epic database. This document pulls data from the account and line levels, or you can manually input data.

Next Steps

Watch the Best Practices for Benefits Accounting in Epic workshop series on demand for more information and helpful demonstrations.