How to organise a book of business
Five decisions, in the order they have to be made, and an eight-point check you can run against whatever you have now. Most of this is free of any particular software.
A book that is organised badly does not announce itself. It shows up as renewals nobody worked, cross-sell nobody spotted, and a book value nobody quite believes.
1. Decide what a record is
Before anything else: is a record a person, a household, or a business? The answer changes every report you will run afterwards, and changing it later means re-keying the book.
The practical answer for most brokerages is the person or the legal entity, with a way to associate them. A household is a useful view; it is a poor primary record, because people move, separate and die, and your data model should not need a decision when they do.
Whatever you pick, write it down. Half of all data mess in a brokerage is two people answering this question differently for three years.
2. Give every client one owner
One name, not a team. A client owned by "commercial lines" is owned by nobody, and the failure only surfaces at renewal, when everybody assumes somebody else called.
Owner is also the field that makes every other view useful. "Renewals in the next 30 days" is a report. "Your renewals in the next 30 days" is a to-do list, and only one of those gets acted on.
3. A client is not a policy
This is the one worth stopping on. Plenty of brokerages model their book as a list of policies with a client name typed on each one. It works until you ask a question about the client rather than the policy, and then it cannot answer at all.
"What does this household hold with us" is the question behind every cross-sell conversation and most retention calls. If policies are not linked to a single client record, the answer requires a text search on a name that may be spelled three ways.
It also breaks your numbers quietly. Count a client with four policies as four clients and your retention rate, your average premium per client and your book concentration are all wrong, in a direction that flatters you.
4. Build the four views that get used
- Renewing in the next 90 days, by owner. The working list.
- Past their renewal date and still open. The most urgent thing in any book and the easiest to lose, because a forward-looking view hides it.
- Clients holding exactly one policy. Cross-sell, and also your highest churn risk.
- Nobody has contacted in six months. Silence is the cheapest churn signal you have and almost nobody looks at it.
Four views. If a fifth does not get opened weekly, it is a report, not a view, and it can live somewhere else.
5. Run this hygiene check
Eight counts. Run them today, write the numbers down, run them again in a month. If a count is not falling, the process that creates the problem has not changed.
| Count | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Clients with no owner | Nobody is responsible. This is the list that turns into lost renewals. |
| Policies with no expiry date | Invisible to every renewal view you will ever build. |
| Expiry dates in the past, still marked active | Either lapsed or mis-keyed. Both need a decision. |
| Duplicate clients | Usually the same person entered twice with different spellings or no email. |
| Policy numbers appearing twice | Either a genuine duplicate or two policies sharing a number. Both matter. |
| Clients with no email and no phone | You cannot reach them, so you cannot retain them. |
| Policies with no premium | Your book value is wrong by exactly this much. |
| Policies with no commission rate | You cannot check the carrier paid you correctly. |
The client tracking template has the columns these counts assume, if you want somewhere to start that is not your current system.
Where software helps, and where it does not
No system fixes a taxonomy you have not decided, and none of the five decisions above require buying anything. What software does is make the four views free instead of manual, and stop the hygiene counts climbing back up. CovioIQ links policies to one client record, carries an owner on every client, and builds the renewal views from expiry dates.
Related: client records, renewal pipeline, all guides.