Renewal pipeline for independent P and C agencies
BinderRenew turns your book of business into a rolling renewal board, so every account that needs a remarket surfaces while there is still time to quote it. Agencies in 34 states open it on Monday morning and work down the tab.
Monday, 8:40 a.m. Forty one policies expire inside sixty days.
Every principal we talk to can name the accounts that walked last year. What they cannot do is point at the moment those accounts became winnable, which is almost always the six weeks before the expiration date.
A rate change notice hits the kitchen table two weeks before anyone from your office calls. By then the household has already run a quote with a direct writer and made up its mind.
A lost auto and home household averages $2,700 in premium, about $324 in renewal commission every year it stays gone.Renewal dates sit in the management system, in three carrier portals, and on a legal pad next to the phone. Two people in the same office work from lists that do not agree.
Producers we timed spent 6 hours a week reconciling those lists, which is 276 hours a year per seat.A CSR quotes two carriers, the client goes quiet over a holiday, and the file sits until the policy lapses. Nothing in the folder records what was quoted or why it stopped.
One stalled remarket a month on a $38,000 premium account is roughly $4,560 in commission.You learn the book slipped when the contingency statement shows up in the spring. The first cancellation that started the slide happened the previous June.
Two points of retention on a book writing $4.1 million is about $82,000 in premium out the door.There is no implementation project and no data migration. You bring a policy list, tell BinderRenew when a renewal should wake up, and the board does the sorting from there.
Export a policy list from your management system and drop the CSV in. You map seven columns once: named insured, policy number, carrier, line of business, effective date, expiration date and assigned producer. Everything else is optional.
Decide when an account wakes up. Most agencies open personal lines at 60 days and commercial at 120, with hard rails at 45, 30 and 14 days. Each rail can carry its own owner and its own required action.
Each producer opens one tab holding only the accounts due today. Call, text or email, log the touch in a single click, and the account moves to the next rail with the note attached to the file.
On the first business day of the month the report lands: retained, rewritten, lapsed and lost, sliced by line, carrier and producer. Print it for the producer meeting or send it to the carrier marketing rep.
The drawer stays. The guessing about what is in it does not.
| Rail | Days out | What the board asks for | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Watch | 120 to 91 | Flag commercial accounts with a scheduled audit or a pending filing | Principal |
| Open | 90 to 61 | Pull loss runs, confirm exposures, read the renewal premium | Account manager |
| Quote | 60 to 31 | Remarket anything above your rate change threshold | Producer |
| Present | 30 to 15 | Deliver the offer and the comparison by phone or in person | Producer |
| Close | 14 to 0 | Confirm the bind, collect the signed application, log the outcome | CSR |
Nothing here is borrowed from a generic sales pipeline. Each part exists because an agency principal asked for it while we sat at the front desk watching the work.
Every policy in the book sorts itself into date rails, so the accounts inside sixty days sit at the top of the tab and the rest stay out of the way. Filter by line, carrier, producer or premium band and the count updates as you go.
Set the increase you are willing to let ride, by line, and BinderRenew marks anything above it the day the renewal premium arrives. A 4 percent bump on a homeowner policy stays quiet; a 19 percent bump moves straight into the quote rail.
Log every carrier you approached, the premium that came back and the date the quote expires, all on the policy record instead of in a reply chain. When a remarket goes cold for eight days the account climbs back to the top of the list.
Calls, texts, emails and voicemails all record against the policy with the person, the minute and a two line note. Six months later the principal can see that the client was reached three times before the account moved, and can prove it.
Policy count retention and premium retention run side by side, broken out by line, carrier, producer and month. Rewrites into another carrier count as retained, because they are, and the report shows both figures so nobody argues about the method.
Enter a carrier nonrenewal or a cancellation for nonpayment and the account jumps every rail with the reinstatement window on the card. Personal lines teams use it to catch the ten day pay window before the policy is gone for good.
These figures come from 61 agencies that ran the board for four consecutive quarters and let us compare their retention against the year before they started.
Average twelve month policy retention, measured against the 88.6 percent those same agencies recorded the year before. The gain comes almost entirely from accounts touched more than thirty days out.
Median days before expiration when the client first hears from the agency, up from 12 days. Anything past three weeks gives you room to remarket instead of defending a number.
Median annualized commission an agency kept in year one that its own prior year pattern says would have walked. Multi location agencies on the top tier reported more than double that.
Time each producer stopped spending every week on list building, portal checks and asking the office who already called. That is most of a working day returned to quoting.
We asked each of them the same question: what does Monday look like now compared with the Monday before you started.
I had a legal pad with expirations on it for nineteen years and I was proud of that pad. The first month on the board we found eleven homeowner policies inside forty days that nobody had opened, and two of them had taken a rate increase north of twenty percent. We saved nine of the eleven.
Commercial renewals were the part that scared me, because a contractor account is six policies and an audit. Now the whole account sits on one card with the audit date on it, and my account manager and I stop stepping on each other. Our commercial retention went from 86 to 93 in four quarters.
What sold me was the touch log. When a client calls angry about a nonrenewal I can read back the three times we tried them in October. That conversation used to cost me an afternoon and usually the account, and now it takes four minutes.
Load the whole book on any tier. What changes between plans is how many people work it and how deep the reporting runs.
The one producer shop, often with a part time CSR and a personal lines book under 900 policies.
$39 per month
Two to eight people sharing a book, the tier nine out of ten independent agencies land on.
$89 per month
Commercial heavy agencies and groups running more than one location or more than one brand.
$189 per month
Every plan is billed monthly in US dollars and can be cancelled at any time. There is no annual contract, no setup fee and no charge per policy. Cancel from the billing page and the account stays open through the end of the month you already paid for, with a full CSV export of your records available the whole time.
If something below is still unclear, write to us and a person who has sat in an agency will answer you.
Plans run $39, $89 or $189 per month depending on how many people work the book and how deep you need the reporting. There is no setup fee, no per policy charge and no annual contract. Billing is monthly in US dollars and you can stop it yourself from the account screen. If your agency adds producers mid year you can move up a tier and the difference is prorated on the next invoice.
Most agencies are working their first expiration list the same afternoon they sign up. You export a policy list as a CSV, map seven columns, and the board builds itself from the effective and expiration dates. A book under 3,000 policies usually takes under an hour including cleanup of the carrier name column. We will sit on a screen share for the first import if you want a second set of eyes on the mapping.
Your book sits in US data centers, encrypted in transit with TLS and at rest with AES 256. Access is scoped by seat, so a personal lines CSR does not see the commercial book unless the principal grants it. We do not sell, rent or broker your policy data, and nobody here contacts your clients for any reason. Every export and every permission change is written to an audit trail the principal can read at any time.
No, and it should not. Your management system stays the record for policies, accounting and carrier download, while BinderRenew is the work board that sits beside it. Agencies import from AMS360, EZLynx, Applied Epic, HawkSoft and QQCatalyst with a scheduled CSV export, usually weekly. Notes and outcomes you record against a renewal can be pushed back out as a CSV so your activity log stays complete.
You can cancel any month from the billing page without calling anyone. Before you go, export every policy record, touch note and retention report as CSV files, as many times as you want. We hold the data for thirty days in case you change your mind, then remove it from live systems and from backups on the next rotation. There is no cancellation fee and no retention call to sit through.
Most producers really do know their top twenty accounts by heart, and we are not trying to improve on that. The problem is the other four hundred: the monoline auto that quietly moved to a direct writer, the small BOP that absorbed a 19 percent increase without a phone call. BinderRenew works the tail of the book, not the relationships at the front of it. It hands each person a short list every morning and keeps the record of who was reached, so the principal is not rebuilding retention from memory in January.
The Renewal Desk is published out of this office. It covers how a commercial account is worked in the ninety days before expiration, what an underwriter actually needs before quoting, and how retention gets counted once rewrites are hiding inside it. Three newest pieces below.
practical guide
A day by day path from the ninety day mark to the binder, covering exposure updates, loss run orders, carrier appetite checks, remarketing decisions, and the proposal meeting itself.
checklist
What an underwriter needs before quoting: current ACORD applications, five years of loss runs, a dated statement of values, driver lists, payroll by class code, and a clean cover email.
comparison
Guaranty fund protection, rate and form filing, diligent search affidavits, surplus lines taxes and stamping fees, and cancellation rules all differ. Here is how each one lands on a renewal you have to place.
Nine articles for independent property and casualty agents, published September 3, 2026.
Send the lines you write, the systems you already pay for and roughly how many policies you carry. We will come back with a walkthrough using a renewal pattern that looks like yours, not a sample agency in a slide deck.
Prefer to write directly? Email jimenezjulien42@gmail.com and mention your agency name and state.
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