Commission reconciliation for independent insurance agencies

The specific complaint here is precise enough to build on directly: 'the software adds the entire month together instead of allowing reconciliation per check.' That means an agency receiving commission payments from multiple carriers cannot match a single check to the specific policies it covers — they get a lump monthly total and have to reverse-engineer it manually. This is not a reporting preference; it is an accounting control problem. If a carrier underpays on three policies buried in a $47,000 monthly statement, there is no systematic way to catch it.

This gap persists because AMS vendors are built around policy and client management. Commission accounting is a secondary module bolted on to justify the price, not a product designed by someone who understands carrier statement formats. The people who feel this pain most acutely are agency controllers and bookkeepers — who are rarely consulted during AMS purchasing decisions, which are made by the agency principal or IT.

The existing workflow, as users describe it, produces 'a lot of manual work': downloading carrier statements as PDFs or CSVs, building a spreadsheet map of expected vs. received commissions per policy, and reconciling by hand. Agencies that skip this step are effectively trusting carriers to pay correctly, which audits routinely show is optimistic.

This is a business because it recurs every single month, the dollar stakes are high enough to justify a dedicated tool (a mid-size agency might process $500K–$2M in annual commissions), and the manual alternative is both time-consuming and error-prone. An AMS vendor has no incentive to build this properly because doing so would require ingesting carrier-specific statement formats — there are hundreds — which is a data-maintenance burden they don't want to own.

What to build

Build a web app that ingests carrier commission statements (PDF and CSV) via upload or email forwarding, parses them against expected commission records exported from the agency's AMS, flags line-item discrepancies per policy per check, and produces a reconciliation report the bookkeeper can sign off on before posting to the general ledger.

Where to start

Target agencies that write heavily with one or two dominant carriers (State Auto, Travelers, or Progressive commercial) and build perfect parsers for those two carriers first — agencies where 80% of commission volume runs through two carriers get immediate value before the long tail is covered.

The hard part

Carrier statement formats vary wildly and change without notice — building and maintaining parsers for even the top 30 carriers is a significant ongoing engineering cost that has to be absorbed before you have enough customers to justify it.

How it makes money

Monthly subscription at $149–$299/month per agency location, scaling with the number of carrier statement formats connected; setup fee covers initial carrier parser configuration.