Spreadsheets vs. Commissions Software: 5 Reasons Why Insurance Agencies Are Making the Switch

Table of Contents

• 5 reasons why spreadsheets fall short
• How to switch to Commissions+

If you're still processing your agency's commissions with spreadsheets, you're not alone. Many agencies continue to use spreadsheets for commission processing because they are:

• Familiar
• Accessible
• Easy for basic calculations

But commission processing is far from simple without the right tools.

With spreadsheets, your agency is juggling:

 Managing dozens of carrier statements

 Calculating complex splits for multiple agents

 Tracking premium periods

 Trying to catch errors in commission payments from uplines/carriers

In this blog, we'll cover five reasons why spreadsheets fall short for commissions tracking and why your agency should transition to commission-specific software. 

1. Spreadsheets Are Highly Susceptible to Errors

With Spreadsheets: While spreadsheets work well for many tasks, commissions management requires a lot of manual data entry and updates. This manual process can open the door to costly errors. 

When using spreadsheets, you must manually track these data points to spot errors:

• Bill from date: The premium period you're being paid for (not the month you receive payment, which is the "Statement Date")
• Effective date: When commission payments should begin
• Premium amount (if applicable): The basis for calculating commission payments
• Number of lives (if applicable): Another factor that determines commission amounts
• Commission frequency: How often you should expect to receive payments

As your agency grows, your formulas can become increasingly complex and harder to maintain. There's also the risk factor: since anyone with access can edit cells directly, even a small mistake, like a typo or accidental deletion, can throw off your entire process.

Pro Tip: If you're currently using spreadsheets, lock any cells containing formulas to prevent unintended changes that could affect your agency’s commissions processing. 

With Commissions+: Commissions+ tracks commissions at the policy level in a secure, structured system. All your commission data is organized so the system automatically tracks who should be paid and how much.

Getting set up with Commissions+ involves:

• Creating rate tables that define your commission splits
• Adding payees to define who gets paid 
• Connecting the rate tables and payees to existing policies 

 Here's how to set up rate tables in Commissions+:

1. Create a new rate table.
2. Name the rate table descriptively so you know what type of payout structures it has (i.e., “75/25 Split” or “100% of Commission”).
3. Add rules to the rate table by specifying rate types (% of Commission, % of Premium, Flat Amount, Per Life, or % of Remainder).
4. For policies that change, set time periods to automatically adjust.
5. Save your rate table and start applying it to policies.

Once complete, Commissions+ processes commissions automatically when you import carrier statements.

2. Spreadsheets Are Time-Consuming

With Spreadsheets: Tracking your health insurance agency’s commissions in spreadsheets can take a significant amount of time. Between updating formulas, double-checking calculations, and tracking down data across multiple tabs, what should be straightforward can easily consume hours of your team's day.

Even if you know all the shortcuts and tricks, you're still doing manual work that doesn't need to be manual anymore. By switching to industry-specific commission software, agencies are saving significant time and transforming how they process commissions.

With Commissions+:

Commission+ is designed to handle the heavy lifting automatically, so your agency doesn't have to. It's built specifically to save your team time on processing commissions in ways that spreadsheets weren't designed to do. See Commissions+ in Action: Watch Our Overview Video

3. Spreadsheets Aren't a Dependable Audit Trail

With Spreadsheets: Depending on how you're organizing all of your spreadsheets, you may not have an adequate audit trail. You need an easy way to look back on a specific time period at any given time, but you also need a clean spreadsheet.  Serving both of these needs in one file can be extremely difficult.

With Commissions+: Generate accurate, reliable reports in seconds with Commissions+.

Commissions+ comes with a collection of standard reports that give your agency quick, dependable insight into your commission data. These ready-to-use reports help you track payments, spot discrepancies, and evaluate performance. 

Here are a few of the standard reports you can run in Commissions+:

• Commission Not Received: Quickly identify missing commissions from carriers
• Carrier Deposits: View all deposits received across your transactions
• Commission Payments: See how much commission the agency earned, who received payment, and the payment method
• Commission Totals: Track total premiums and commissions paid to individual agents or the agency
• Agent Balances: Evaluate agent performance using current and previous balances, payment frequency, and balance carryovers

Once these reports are generated, your agency can reference them with confidence weeks or months later, knowing the numbers haven't changed. Your reports remain a reliable, unchangeable record you can trust.

4. Spreadsheets Limit Your Performance Analysis Capabilities

With Spreadsheets: While spreadsheets are helpful for organizing and calculating data when set up correctly, they aren’t designed to be performance analysis tools. You can analyze data in spreadsheets, but it’s a much more manual and time-consuming process compared to using commissions-specific software.

If your agency depends on spreadsheets for insights, you’ll need to dedicate time to cleaning data and setting up formulas to get meaningful results. Even with careful setup, getting clear insights from spreadsheet data can be difficult.

With Commissions+: Agencies using Commissions+ from AgencyBloc can quickly answer critical commissions questions, like:

• Who are my top-producing agents?
• What products bring in the most money?
• Were my commission payments accurate?
• What are my projected commissions for next year?
• What have I received thus far vs. what I'm expecting to receive?

Answering these questions is essential for understanding your business performance.

Use commissions reporting tools in Commissions+ to transform your commission data into clear, visual insights. Access pre-built graphs and charts that reveal exactly how your commission processes are performing.

Explore commission-specific graphs in Commissions+, like: 

• Top commissions received (by agent or carrier)
• Net commissions (by carrier or coverage type)
• Net vs received commissions (by carrier or coverage type)
• Actual vs. projected commissions (by month or coverage type)

Using this information, you can make informed decisions for the future, like which carriers and products you’ll offer, who you’ll staff, and how you’ll spend your money.

5. Spreadsheets Can't Identify Missing Commission Payments

With Spreadsheets: One of the biggest concerns health insurance agencies have is whether they're being paid accurately from carriers. Spreadsheets make it nearly impossible to catch missing or incorrect commission payments for three key reasons:

1. There is no automatic cross-referencing: To find missing commissions, you have to manually check every policy against every payment report. 
2. Spreadsheets don’t have baseline tracking: Spreadsheets don't track which policies should generate commissions each month, so there's no way to flag when something doesn't appear.
3. There are no alerts: If a carrier misses a payment or is delayed, you won't know unless you catch it yourself.

With Commissions+: Commissions+ handles the commissions track

When the system flags a missed or inaccurate payment, all the details you need to reconcile with carriers appear instantly: policyholder name, policy number, carrier, status, and effective date. With Commissions+ there’s no more hunting through files or chasing down information.

The Commissions Not Received report gives you a clear, organized list of exactly which policies haven't generated expected payments. Instead of spending hours cross-referencing carrier statements against your book of business, you get actionable insights immediately. Many agencies discover thousands of dollars in commissions they never knew they were owed.

Ready to Move Beyond Spreadsheets & Switch to Commissions+?

Your agency deserves the peace of mind knowing that the money you have coming in is correct.

AgencyBloc’s Commissions+ solution streamlines commissions management, letting you track your book of business and process payments accurately.

From initial setup to end reports, Commissions+ has helped countless agencies save valuable time and money. In fact, we’ve helped many agencies cut their time spent processing commissions by 75% and have found tens of thousands of dollars in missing compensation.

Before you invest in new software, it’s important to know the right questions to ask. Get the 7 essential questions every agency should ask vendors about commissions processing to make the best choice for your agency.

Posted by Shannon Beck on Friday, November 14, 2025 in Process Commissions Efficiently

1. commissions
2. vendor vetting