Retention Reporting and Management Systems

[Alice Mooney]

I'm curious what you all do when a policy cancels with one company and a new policy with a different company is effective the date the previous policy was cancelled.  Do you change the policy cancel status to rewritten and change the NBS with the other company as Rewrite?

The situation we have is if an agent writes a NBS policy that replaces a prior policy with another company, they will get paid commission as a rewrite/renewal (% is the same for both). What they want to do with the policy side is change the cancel for one policy and the NBS for the other.

Because of the way AMS works, the only way for reports to recognize a retained policy, I would need to process a Reinstatement to reverse the cancel on the old company and change the policy status to Rewritten. Then I would need to change the NBS download from the new company to Rewrite and select the old company as the prior policy.
With AMS, if the prior policy in the drop down list shows as cancelled, it will be ignored, thus the reinstatement. AMS reports look at the last transaction downloaded or processed (if manual policy) and ignores the policy status...in some cases. Can't seem to get a straight answer about that.

I'll be checking with our audit department to see if reinstating a truly cancelled policy could get us in trouble, but I'd like to know from you guys if I'm getting all worried over nothing. I know we are just changing the data to make reports more accurate, but I still have concerns about changing the data the company sends.

Please let me know if I need to clarify anything.

[Steven Strauss]

In that situation we would do a cancel/re-write. Because TAM picks up the re-write as a renewal, there is little impact from a retention/persistency reporting perspective.

However since I do ALL my reporting outside TAM, I have logic built into my reports to accommodate this exact situation.

[DebAmstutz]

I have ceased having download determine policy status.  People were always forgetting to change NEW to REW because, inevitably, they'd change the policy status to REW and then download would change it to NEW with the rewriting company, since it was a new policy to them, and it is making life easier.  One thing our CSRs do is put a rewrite on a separate policy line from the original.  That makes it easier to determine what's going on when I run my monthly new/lost biz report. Some get a little carried away with it and I've been trying to tell them to use an old policy line - if it's more than a year since the policy was cancelled, go back and re-use it.  Policy history will reflect the old and new numbers just fine.  Most of them never venture into policy history anyway, but I do once in awhile for audits and the like.

[Alice Mooney]

However since I do ALL my reporting outside TAM, I have logic built into my reports to accommodate this exact situation.

We use a BI tool that bypasses a lot of this also.  However, the folks that process the commission insist on changing the policies so they reflect how the commission is paid.  My concern is changing a cancelled policy to renewed to maintain retention when it truly is cancelled with the prior company.  Do I need to worry about doing anything illegal when this is done? Like if we ever get audited, will it bite us in the butt?  If not, do I need to worry that this is not standard practice with all the companies we write with, only done with our major carrier?