Your book, closed out every month: meet Book Growth & Retention
How many clients did you gain, keep and lose last month, and why did each one leave? A new month-end report answers it the same way every month, checks its own numbers, and locks once an admin signs it off.
Ask an agency owner how many policies they wrote last month and you will get a number. Ask how many clients they kept, and the answer gets slower. Ask how many of the clients who left were an AOR change rather than a missed payment, and it turns into a spreadsheet. Book Growth & Retention is a new month-end report in AgencyView that answers those questions the same way every month. It is live now under Analytics, and in the sidebar as Book Growth Report. It counts clients, not policies A household with a marketplace plan and a dental plan is one client. The report counts each client once, under a primary line of business (Marketplace / ACA first, then Medicare, Dental & Vision, Life and Annuities) and under that policy's carrier. A new dental plan for a client you already had is a policy written, not a new client. A client who leaves with three policies is one loss, not three. That rule is what makes the rest of the numbers mean something. Clients on book is everyone with at least one policy in force on the last day of the month. Enrolled is everyone on the book now who was not on it last month. Lost is everyone who was on it last month and is not now. Start plus enrolled minus lost equals the book, exactly. Retention that new sales cannot flatter Retention is the clients you started the month with, minus the ones you lost, divided by the clients you started with. New enrollments are not in it, so a big sales month cannot hide a bad retention month. Below 10 clients the rate is withheld, because a single loss would swing it too far to mean anything. Why each client left Every lost client lands in one of four columns: canceled, termed, AOR lost or other. The column comes from a new Loss Reason on the policy, which appears once a policy is termed, cancelled or inactive: Canceled – never effective Termed – nonpayment Termed – voluntary AOR change Moved to Medicare Deceased Other Two of them fill themselves in. If the client is marked Deceased, or an under-65 health plan ended while the client has active Medicare, the nightly sweep records it for you. Everything else is for a person to choose, because a guess about why a client left is worse than a blank. A lost client with no Loss Reason is counted by the policy's status instead, and the report tells you how many are missing. A lost AOR can only show as AOR lost once someone has recorded it, so that is the reason most worth setting. Policies that never took hold A written policy is not a placed policy. The report counts placement exceptions separately, and AgencyView now raises a Placement alert on the client so somebody follows up while it still matters: a policy still pending 14 or more days after its effective date; if you are connected to HealthSherpa, an ACA plan whose first premium was not paid after the plan started, a past-due premium, or a plan in its grace period. Each alert clears itself once it no longer applies, so the list you see is the list that still needs work. If you are connected to ComTrack, its commission alerts for policies that were never paid, or were paid and are now inactive, count as placement exceptions too. Checked before anyone signs it Before a month goes for review, the report checks its own numbers: lines of business and carriers add up to the book; policy status and end dates agree; every in-force policy belongs to a client; every inactive client has a reason; every lost client has a Loss Reason; no urgent or past-due ops tasks were left open at month-end; if you are connected to ComTrack, the ComTrack book matches the CRM; the month before was saved. A check that does not pass does not stop you. It asks for a note: why the number is what it is, and what is being done about it. The reviewer reads those notes next to the checks. Who closes the month Someone prepares it. Agency admins, sub-agency admins, independent agents and CSR seats can open the report, and anyone who can open it can prepare it. They add a note to every check that did not pass, then send it for review. An agency admin who did not prepare it reviews it, and either approves it or sends it back with a note saying what to fix. Once reviewed, the month is locked. The number does not drift A server job saves each month on the first day of the next one. After that it does not change, even if someone back-dates a policy in October. The August you signed off is the August you will see in December, and the one you show a partner or your FMO. The monthly trend shows saved months as solid bars. Months from before you started using the report are worked out from policy dates and shown as pale estimates, so you get a history on day one without pretending it was checked. What you need A connected CRM. The report reads the clients and policies already on your books. HealthSherpa, if you want payment problems on ACA plans flagged. ComTrack, if you want the roster check and its never-paid alerts counted. Open it from Analytics, or from Book Growth Report in the sidebar. The full announcement is in the AgencyView newsroom .
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