5 min read

Commission audit for independent insurance agencies

What an audit checks, what you need before it can start, and what Lapidar is being built to do. It is in development and has not launched.

By Lapidar, the team building it · October 7, 2026

In short

A commission audit asks, for a period of statements, whether the agency was paid everything it earned and nothing it should return.
It covers six findings: commissions missing, underpaid, paid twice, charged back, on a statement but not in your book, and paid to the wrong place.
To start you need carrier statements, your book of business, and the commission schedule for each carrier and line. Gaps in those three limit what an audit can find.
Lapidar is in development and not launched. Early access is open, and we can’t yet show results.

A commission audit is a structured check of what carriers paid you against what your policies and agreements say they should have paid. It is not a single report. It is a comparison that has to be done carrier by carrier, period by period, and the answer is rarely clean. This page sets out what an audit looks at, what you need before one can start, and what Lapidar is being built to do.

What a commission audit covers

Missing commissions

A policy that should have paid and did not. The commonest case is a renewal: no statement line exists, so nothing flags it. Finding it means starting from the book. Some missing items are only late, so an audit separates “not yet due” from “not paid”. See missing renewal commissions.

Underpaid commissions

A line that is there but too low: a rate below your schedule, a commission calculated on net instead of gross premium, an endorsement not reflected, or a split applied wrongly. Each needs the right expected rate to be known first.

Paid twice

The same commission appearing twice, within a statement or across periods. Duplicates may be a carrier error, or a correction and its original both reported. The audit has to tell which, because an overpayment is often taken back later.

Chargebacks

Commission the carrier takes back after a cancellation, return premium or endorsement. An audit checks that each chargeback is valid, correctly sized for the unearned period, and tied to a commission you actually received. See commission chargebacks explained.

On the statement, not in your book

Lines for policies your records don’t contain. They may be a data-entry gap, business written under another code, or a payment that isn’t yours. They are worth resolving either way, because they also weaken every later comparison.

Paid to the wrong place

Commission sent under another agency or producer code, or routed through a network or aggregator. This is often why a policy looks missing. If you have more than one code, an audit has to look at all of them.

What you need to start

Carrier commission statements for the period, in whatever form they arrive: PDF, CSV or spreadsheet. Missing months leave holes in the result, and the audit can only judge what it was given. Our guide to reading a carrier statement explains the fields.
Your book of business as an export from your system: policy numbers, insured names, effective dates, premium, status, carrier and line.
Commission schedules for each carrier and line, separate for new business and renewal, plus any splits, tiers or contingent arrangements. Without them an audit can find missing and duplicate lines but cannot tell whether a rate is right.
Deposit records, if you want to confirm that what a statement says was paid is what reached the bank.
A period to look at. Chargebacks and late payments mean that recent months are the least settled. Older periods are easier to judge but may be past a carrier’s window for correcting an error, which your agreements set.

If the book is stale or the schedules are incomplete, expect the first pass to turn up data problems before it turns up money. That is normal and worth fixing.

Why it takes time

Carriers format statements differently and sometimes change them. Policy numbers rarely match across systems. A finding that looks like a loss is often a timing difference, and one that looks fine can hide a wrong rate. Each result needs a decision about whether to raise it with the carrier. An audit that makes this look quick is skipping steps. If your agency management system covers part of this, our page on what an AMS reconciles and what it misses lists the questions to ask your vendor.

What Lapidar will do

Lapidar is in development and has not launched. It is being built so that an agency uploads statements and its book, and gets back a list of findings under the headings above, each with the lines behind it, so you can decide what to raise with the carrier. It will sit beside your existing system. We have no customers, case studies or published results yet, and we won’t imply any. Early access is open: join the list below and we’ll write once, when the first agencies can start.