A letter from Science4Data on the biggest unsolved problem in the MGA back office and the platform that finally solves it.
There is a process that sits at the heart of every MGA, every carrier, every reinsurance broker, and every reinsurer in the world. It determines whether premiums are calculated correctly. Whether commissions are paid accurately. Whether binding authority is respected. Whether the carrier relationship survives another month.
It is the bordereau. And for the vast majority of the insurance distribution chain, it is still being produced by hand. In Excel. Every single month.
"The bordereau is the financial heartbeat of the insurance distribution chain. It is time it was treated like one."
This newsletter is about what that costs. And about what happens when it is finally, permanently automated.
The insurance industry does not talk openly about the cost of manual bordereau production. It should. Because the numbers are significant.
Manual bordereau production introduces risk at every stage of the process. Here is where the damage happens.
Reconciliation errors compound quietly across every reporting cycle. A 0.5% commission calculation error on a $50M GWP book is $62,500 of misallocated income that nobody can trace.
When commission is calculated manually there is no audit trail. Disputes have no resolution path. The MGA cannot prove their figures and the carrier cannot verify them.
Utilization is checked after the fact, not before. Policies are bound in unauthorized states. Excluded classes slip through. The breach is discovered months later in the bordereau.
Manual processes miss deadlines. Every late bordereau damages the carrier relationship. Repeated late submissions trigger capacity reviews that no MGA wants to face.
A folder of Excel files is not an audit trail. When the carrier auditor arrives, the MGA cannot demonstrate data lineage, version control, or calculation accuracy. That is an audit liability.
When an MGA produces an inaccurate bordereau, the error travels up the entire insurance distribution chain. Every participant downstream is working from corrupted data.
A formula error in an MGA spreadsheet becomes a cession error at the carrier. That becomes a treaty bordereau error at the reinsurance broker. That becomes a portfolio analytics error at the reinsurer. The bordereau is the data foundation of the entire chain. When it is built manually, the foundation is unreliable.
"MGA operations struggle to get data from existing solutions into formats suitable for their multiple carriers. Carriers have difficulty efficiently absorbing the report data to transform it into actionable intelligence."
MGAs have invested heavily in policy administration systems. DuckCreek. Applied Epic. Vertafore AMS360. These are sophisticated platforms that manage the full policy lifecycle with precision.
They calculate premiums correctly. They track endorsements and cancellations accurately. They maintain policy records with complete data integrity.
And then every month, someone exports that clean, accurate data into Excel and manually rebuilds the bordereau from scratch.
The PAS does its job perfectly. The bordereau process undoes all of it.
Nobody had built a purpose-built bordereau automation platform that connected natively to the PAS systems MGAs already use, validated every policy record, calculated GWP and GEP and commission automatically, reconciled the bordereau against the PAS in real time, and delivered it to the carrier with a full audit trail.
Until now.
The first purpose-built, end-to-end bordereau automation platform for MGAs, carriers, reinsurance brokers, and reinsurers. One platform. One automated run. From PAS ingestion to carrier delivery.
Bordereau Pro takes the entire monthly bordereau cycle and automates it in a single, auditable, repeatable run.
Connects directly to your PAS via API. DuckCreek, Applied Epic, Vertafore AMS360. Extracts all policy records automatically on the first business day after month end. If the API fails, falls back to SFTP or Excel automatically.
Every policy passes through a 100 point data quality gate. Hard stops exclude invalid policies before they corrupt your numbers. Warnings flag issues for acknowledgment. Binding authority is checked at ingestion, before you breach your authority.
GWP calculated across new, renewal, endorsement, and cancellation transactions. GEP calculated using 1/365 Daily Pro-Rata, Monthly Pro-Rata, or 1/8ths Actuarial. Commission calculated automatically against your carrier agreement. Every figure traceable to the source policy record.
PAS totals compared against bordereau totals automatically. Zero variance produces a PASS. Variance above $100 blocks finalization until resolved. Variance KPI target is under 0.5% before approval.
Bordereau produced in Excel, PDF, and CSV simultaneously. Delivered to your carrier via SFTP, email, or portal. Every delivery logged in an immutable audit trail. Finalized versions are immutable. All records retained for ten years.
The two-way reconciliation engine compares PAS data against bordereau calculations across every key metric. Finalization is blocked on any unresolved FAIL status.
| Variance | Status | Action Required |
|---|---|---|
| $0.00 | ✓ PASS | No action required |
| $0.01 to $100.00 | ⚠ WARNING | Review and document reconciling item |
| Above $100.00 | ✗ FAIL | Finalization blocked until resolved |
Bordereau Pro serves all four segments of the insurance distribution chain simultaneously.
Every operation in Bordereau Pro is recorded in an immutable audit trail with timestamp, user identity, and role. Finalized bordereau versions are immutable. All records are retained for a minimum of ten years. Two-factor authentication is required for all users. Role-based access controls govern every action.
"When the carrier auditor arrives, the MGA has a complete, unalterable record of every bordereau ever produced, every calculation ever performed, and every delivery ever made."
That is not just compliance. That is competitive advantage.
Bordereau Pro by Science4Data automates your entire monthly bordereau cycle from PAS to carrier delivery in a single run. No manual work. No reconciliation failures. No late submissions.