We are currently working on a video for this. You can reference our older walk through HERE and read the new article/transcript below.
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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
This is an important video so it goes in depth. We’ve broken it into sections to help you through it. First, we’ll show the how to track policies & commissions, detailing the agent experience of adding the policies into the client record, then how the admins can use the Commission Module. Finally, we’ll cover how the admins can set up the carriers, products & commission structures. Buckle in.

Let’s look first at how an agent will enter the carrier/product details for the client or lead so you understand how this will look to an agent. Then we’ll dive into how to set up the carriers, products & commissions.

The Agent Experience:

Once the carriers & products are set up by the account admin, they will look like this. The agent will go into a lead or client file and to the policies tab. They’ll enter in the policy’s coverage type, policy status, carrier, product, effective date, renewal date, application date and any other data that you want them to capture. We’ll cover customizing policy fields later in the video. But these data points are essential to generating any workflows or sales tracking you are doing. Once the client is confirmed. The agent will Convert to Client, update the record status to Active. Then go into the policy tab, update the policy status and the policy or customer number. This is critical if you want to use commission reconciliation as the carrier statements will match based on either policy or customer number.

You may wonder, “why do I need to add the coverage type & status into this policy since I have it in the lead or client information page?” Good question! The answer is, because you might have had a lead who is primarily interested in Medicare come in. Then you quote the MAPD policy for them. Once they’re converted to a client with an active status, maybe that MAPD policy wasn’t accepted, so we’ll mark its status as Declined By Carrier. However, we did get them set up with a Supplement policy that is now In Force. And as you work with that client over the years, they’ll always be active as a client, but their policies will most likely change status and you will want to keep track of them all.

Big Take Away: Once the policy is accepted, update the policy status, the policy or customer numbers and any other relevant details so it’s fully tracked and functional.

If you need to override the commission or renewal amounts for this policy, do so by clicking Override. Do this with caution though as it will effect the commission module from generating any updates from the product set up. Bonuses can be positive or negative amounts. Anything else you need to add in save.

Once you've entered & saved the policy information, the commission module for that policy will generate. You can click on each products commission to access it or click the options to edit view Commissions. You could also delete, but we would never recommend that unless you accidentally entered it in twice. As always in Radius, if you delete something in Radius, in this case a policy, it's gone. Better to change the policy status to canceled. You’ll then have your historical commissions for that policy captured.

Let’s choose to see the commissions for this policy. You see on the left hand columns the projected payment dates and amounts per the structure that you set up on the product level plus the premium and the effective date. Now you can enter in when and how much you actually got paid on the right columns. If this is a product that you get paid in advance on, this is where you'd enter that information.

When the client confirms the renewal of the plan, or if it rolls over, check the renewal date is correct (update to the current year if not), then in the commissions, hit GENERATE RENEWALS. You do need to update the renewal date each year in order for it to calculate for the correct year. If a policy is 2 years old, it might have a different commission rate than if it’s a 20 year old policy. We’ll see this in action when we look at setting up commissions based on tier years later in the admin set up section.

While it’s helpful to be able to enter commissions manually, it would be so much more fun to have Radius do that for you! So, let’s look at the Commission Statement Import Module!

Now we’ll review how the commission statement import module works. Only admins will have access to seeing this module and uploading the carrier statements.

However, if agents want to keep watching, it may be helpful to understand why the policy details you enter are so critical.

Click on Commissions on the left side bar. Hit Import From File. Select the carrier, then attach their statement by hitting Browse. This must be either a .csv or an excel file. Hit Save & Analyze.

You’ll now see a few sample rows so you can tell that the document is being read. See how it’s finding the member number and mapping it in Blue below? That’s the most crucial part of the mapping. And the Statement Date and Commission Amount. If you don’t see any mapping in blue for your spreadsheet, contact us on the Help App ticket system and let us know the carrier name and the header row. We will get that carrier mapped.

Now let’s hit Start Commission Import. We’re brought in to the reconciliation section now. If it all looks good, hit Save Commissions at the bottom of the page. If you need to double check or edit anything, you have the options to view the row from the carrier statement here, then you can edit the person’s product here or view their commission statement here. If you haven’t hit Generate Renewals for that person, you can add in their new renewal date and hit Generate Renewals so you see the projected amount for that year as well as the received amounts. If you see the error “No client match found for import” it’s because the customer or policy number is not associated with a product. Click this Plus Sign to add in the client and/or policy. Please watch the full video on adding clients & policies from the commission statement for full details.

You can delete any rows you don’t want imported by hitting the X here. Hit SAVE. You can manually add commissions to the system by hitting “Add Commission”. Save.

Once you’ve imported your statements, you can go to Reports> Revenue Report. Set up a revenue report for the carrier and/or month or whatever time frame you like. If you hit RUN, you’ll just see an overview of the projected versus the actual received. If you hit download, you’ll get a play by play of which policies were expected to have commission, how much and what commission you received on that policy and when. If someone is listed as only expecting commission payment, but not showing a received payment, you should call the carrier to get an explanation of the discrepancy.

So that was an overview of how to track policies and commissions. Now let’s dive into how to get the carriers, products and commission structure set up. This part is only for admins, so agent level users don’t need to keep going! (Unless you’re simply fascinated now?!)

There is a short cut available to adding a list of carriers and products. It will bring in all of those products as a default of $0 flat rate commission, so after me showing you this trick, you’ll still want to watch the rest of the video to make the right choice for you whether to use this trick or not. And you’ll still want to know the rest of the options you have in Carriers & Products set up!

OK, here’s the shortcut.

Prepare a spreadsheet where the first column is Carrier names and the 2nd column is Product names. You can even have duplicates in this file and it’ll ignore any exact matches, so you could grab a spreadsheet you have that lists all of your clients’ carriers and product names and use that to build this simple list. Once done, go to Settings> Products and you’ll see the option to Import. Upload the file and hit Import Carriers & Products. You will still need to manually edit the carrier details and the commission splits.

So let’s now look at the more thorough way to do this.

Go to Settings carriers, click edit.

Click Add carrier. You can add one at a time here, but I like pasting a list of my carriers to easily import. Hit create.

If you like you can go in and edit the carrier so that you can add in contact information and carrier documents and links. You can track notes, set information, add contacts, add documents, and add web links. This is an especially helpful tool if you have a large team because your whole team will have access to any of the information you've assigned to it. You can choose where to display the information.

By checking agent access the document or link will appear in this carrier info section. The lead client view page will show on the leader clients file and the email screen makes it available as an attachment for email purposes. Let's add a document and I'll select all of those options so we can show you where they appear. Choose a category. I'll select carrier document, assign it to a specific product if you've already set up your products or assign it to all products. Since this is a carrier document, I'll assign it to all products. Click Attach file.

Now we see it here in carrier info on the left side panel, in a record’s files tab, it will appear once we’ve assigned them that product, and on the email options in send email. It will also be available for any template creation. Simply look for Special Links when adding an attachment.

Now you have carriers done I told you it was easy. Onto Products!

Go to Settings, products commissions and renewals edit.

Please note that one of the features of Radius’s AMS plan is Enhanced Commissions. That includes commission splits & matrices. First, we’ll show the basic product options, and finally we’ll go into the AMS Enhanced Commissions feature options. The basic set up that we’ll cover first is also available to the AMS plans so you should not skip this part!

Add product. Choose the carrier and enter a list of the product names that you want to associate with that carrier. Sometimes people get confused between the product name and the coverage type. In Radius, the coverage type could be MAPD for example, but the product might be Plan G+ or even something like MAPD-5123-WI. When in doubt, use the product naming convention that the carrier uses.

Set the commissions and renewals at the product level here. If you just want to get your product set up so that you can import your book of business and have the carriers and products match up when you do a quick trick is to just put in a flat rate of zero for the commission and renewals for all of these. You will set the applicable region. Either available to everyone, for specific states, or county specific. Save.

Note that the system just ignored 2 duplicate products that I almost accidentally created.

We have those products in, but you most likely want to specifically set the Commission and Renewals rates for real tracking. This is where it gets in depth.

Determine if the commission is paid monthly, yearly or every X months. Note that if you get an advance for this product, you'll be entering that on the client level of the product entry. This is for the overall product structure only. So we won't be setting advances yet.

Now determine the structure, flat fee, percentage of premium commissionable premiums, prorated calendar premiums for Medicare Advantage or tier years.

Let's do these as tier years. We'll set the average premium for this product. Again, this is only for the product level. We will set the actual premium at the client level. The average default premium will help you with projections when you assign a product to a lead that you're quoting. Determine if that premium is paid monthly or annually.

You can prorate the first year for this product so that if the effective date is 6/1, it will prorate the annual amount for the policy. You can choose flat rate if needed. The default is percentages. Enter the first tier years let's say the first year is 75%. The next four years are 60% Everything after that is 35%. So we'll put in 100 years since most likely that will carry you through the lifetime.

Or if we click Flat Rate, we could enter in the dollar amounts of commission.

Determine whether the product is available for everyone nationwide, only for specific states or only specific counties. Save.

Let’s look at the other commission structures.

Flat fee is pretty straight forward. Just note that you’ll enter the annualized commission/renewal amounts even if you’ve selected that you get paid monthly on it above.

Percentage of Premium. Set the % for the first year in the commission amount. Determine if that’s a monthly or annual premium calculation here. Then set the % of premium for renewals. If there’s a non-commissionable amount, like the first $100 of the premium is exempt from commission, enter that here. And set a default, average premium here.

Commissionable premiums is kind of the reverse of that. Instead you’d have a default, average premium, paid monthly or annually. Then state how much of that premium you can claim commission against. This is usually for large policies where there’s a cap on the commission. Determine your commission percentage.

Prorated Calendar Premiums will prorate the annualized flat commission and renewals for you based on the policy’s effective date.

Per Member is deceptive! We’re used to Per Member Per Month, but see here how it’s still that annualized amount (then it’ll be split into monthly commission payments so long as you choose monthly in the commission structure section above. So if it’s $20/PMPM, I’d enter $240 here and then we see it calculating projections for a member count of 1 at $240, 2 at $480 and so on. If you had 12 members, it’ll multiply times 12. We just gave you some examples here!

And remember, always SAVE!

If you have downline teams created, you can set agency specific commissions here. This is only for multi-user accounts that have created downline agencies and assigned their users to those agencies.

You can edit your products at any time. Historical data will be maintained in the client policy commissions, but any updated renewal rates will be applied if that policy gets renewed.

Now for the AMS account holders, you can also create commission splits & matrices. Let’s look at a couple of examples.

In Settings> Products, Commissions & Renewals> Edit. Click on Commission Matrices & hit Add Matrix.

If you sell a product like MAPD, you’ll know that the commission rates are fairly standard across carriers and even across some states.

So, let’s create a MAPD NV, AZ, NM matrix.

Apply the relevant products. You’ll notice I can select products from any of my carriers here.

Set the commission payments as monthly, yearly or every X months. Determine if you want the flexibility of the Per-Cell Override, so you can tweak commission payment projections in each policy. If not, leave that unchecked.

Determine the commission structure.

Now this is where it gets different and way cool…. well, if you’re an insurance agent who loves their commissions, it’s way cool… Hit Manage Criteria.

You can set the applicable effective date range.

And add another level to set the custom product field options. I’m going to choose from my Sell Table. And set this section up for New To Medicare. I’ll enter in the commission and renewal amount. So year 1, I get $615 and on renewal, I get $315.

I can set commission splits by changing 100% assigned Agent. Click here. Add recipient. Determine if it’s a percentage or if you want to do the flat rate, you can UNcheck Subject To Proration and they’ll change to flat rates. Let’s set the first year at 80% to the assigned agent, renewals at 50% and then add recipient to set the next commission split up. Let’s say we’ll give 10% to the assigned agent’s upline agency or maybe we want to assign it to a specific team member or a specific agency. Let’s do Best Insurance Ever, which is the top level agency that I’ve set up.

Add recipient again and the other 10% will go to the assigned agent’s agency.

Update Split.

Now let’s add another factor in here. Hit this Plus sign to add another level. So this time, it’s still for the same effective year range. But now the Custom Field Sell Table values of Agent of Record Change or Plan Switch will make this be a $315 first year commission and $315 renewal amount. Add in splits if you like.

Now, you can get wild with this. You can also add another structure to this. So this level we just created is the default level. But let’s say we have a downline agency or a user that’s playing by a different set of rules. We can set up their splits differently. So now, for the same products, if one of their agents sells this product, the commission splits are $10 to the agent and the remainder is split between the agency and its upline.

People also use the matrices for plans that have variables like Riders or Product Qualifiers and much more. The possibilities are endless…and mind numbing. So if you have specific needs, feel free to hit us up in the help app with your specific examples and what’s not working for you. We’ll review and get back to you with our best advice.

Let’s quickly go over some available product customizations. There are more specific videos on each of these steps, so this is just a brief overview.

Policy Status Options:

To change the Policy Status options, go to Settings> Policy Status Options.

You can edit or add the options you want to display.

Decide whether the status should generate commission projections or not. In Force, yup! Terminated, nope!

The sort order is related to the order that you'll see the status options displayed in when selecting from the product status drop down list.

Save if you’re editing or hit create if it’s a new status you’ve added.

Policy Dates:

Go to Settings> Email, Columns, Calendar & Other.

Scroll down to custom dates. Enter in a custom date. For example, Term Date. Set it for Record Policies Only. You’re terminating the policy, not the client!

Or Claim Date, again set it for Record Policies Only.

If you sell group policies, you could potentially have Employee Start Date as a Record Only. But if you want to track the Employee Waiting Period on the policy AND the record, choose Both.

Coverage Types:

You can add, edit or delete coverage types in Settings> Coverage Types & Custom Data Fields

Policy Custom Fields:

Go to Settings> Coverage Types & Custom Data Fields.

Scroll down to Policies Custom Fields. Add any extra fields you need for policies here. You can also create dropdown and multi-select options above in the Create Dropdowns option. For more details, please view the custom fields video.

Wrap up

If you have any questions, please create a tech ticket in the help app with a specific information on what you're trying to accomplish and we'll advise. If there's an actual issue, please provide the client name and the details on the issue so that we can research it for you.