The first 90 days after an insurance agency acquisition: a data checklist

Abe Harbid, 25 October 2026

Whether the platform converts an acquired agency onto its own system right away or leaves it on its old one for a while, the agency’s data has to reach the platform’s reporting. Alvarez and Marsal put the gap plainly: consolidated reporting can give visibility in as little as a quarter, while full system integration takes well over a year [1]. This checklist is about the quarter.

At close: collect the exports

• Clients: names, addresses and any client numbers the agency uses.
• Policies: policy number, client, carrier code, line of business, effective and expiration dates, premium, commission rate, producer.
• Producers: the roster with codes, and the split rules for new and renewal business.
• Carrier statements: at least the last few months for every carrier, in the layouts the carriers send.
• The agency’s carrier code list, and which carriers bill direct and which bill through the agency.

Ask for exports in whatever form the agency’s system produces. Re-keying them is where the errors start.

Days 1 to 30: map and check

• Map each export’s columns to the platform’s standard fields. Keep the mapping, because the next agency on the same system can reuse it.
• Flag rows missing a value the platform needs to import them.
• Find clients entered twice under two spellings.
• Match every producer code to the platform’s roster, and list policies with no producer.
• Map the agency’s carrier codes to the platform’s, and flag the ones with no match with the premium they cover.

Each flag goes to a person with the reason attached. The first month should end with a short, ordered list of decisions.

Days 31 to 60: reconcile commissions

• Match each carrier statement line to a policy in the converted book.
• Compare what the carrier paid with the book’s premium times the book’s rate.
• List lines for policies the export does not contain.
• Total each statement, so the variance by carrier is visible at a glance.

The five usual reasons these stop matching are in why carrier commission statements stop matching.

Days 61 to 90: put the agency in the numbers

• Add the agency to the platform’s dashboard: commission revenue, retention and new business, by agency and by producer.
• Re-run the conversion on a corrected export and keep every decision already made.
• Record the baseline the agency arrived with, so later growth can be told apart from the next acquisition’s revenue.
• Decide what the conversion itself needs, and who does it: the platform’s own team, a conversion vendor, or an integration services firm.

Who owns each step

Conversion vendors move a book from one management system into another. Integration services firms run projects, transitions and cleanup with their own people. The steps above sit across both: the mapping, the checks, the reconciliation and the cross-agency view. Whoever owns integration at the platform should know which of them is covered, and by whom, before the next deal closes.

The acquisition-onboarding engine runs these steps on each agency’s exports. Agency data conversion · The two-week diagnostic