Carrier accountability
What is a carrier short-pay?
A carrier short-pay is commission a carrier paid you at a rate below what your agreement says you’re owed — 12% where your schedule says 15%, a renewal paid at a new-business discount, a premium increase that never trued up your commission. The customer is covered, the carrier earned, and you were quietly paid less than you should have been.
It almost never looks wrong. On one policy a short-pay is a few dollars — indistinguishable from rounding. The damage is in the aggregate: the same small leak across hundreds of policies and a dozen carriers, every cycle, with no line that obviously says “error.”
Why short-pays are so easy to miss
- They're small and scattered — invisible on any single line, real only in total.
- Carrier statements arrive in different formats, often PDF-only, with no rate column to check against.
- Manual reconciliation takes hours per carrier, so most agencies never do it line-by-line.
- There's no alert — a short-pay is the absence of money, and you can't notice a number that's quietly too low.
How to catch — and recover — a short-pay
- 1Get the effective rate. For each policy on the statement, divide commission by premium to get the rate the carrier actually paid.
- 2Compare to your schedule. Hold that effective rate against your contracted commission schedule. Anything below is a short-pay.
- 3Quantify the delta. (Contracted rate − paid rate) × premium = the dollars owed on that policy. Sum across the book.
- 4Build the demand. Group the short-pays into a carrier-ready packet: policy, statement line, your record, and the delta math.
- 5Send and track. Submit it, then confirm the correction appears on a future statement. Money you don't track is money you don't recover.
This is one of seven recurring underpayment patterns. For the full process across all of them, see the commission reconciliation guide.
Find your short-pays automatically.
Run a free audit on your own book — every short-pay, wrong rate, and missing renewal flagged with the dollar delta. No card to start.