Policies, clients, and license holders
A policy has several people attached to it, and in many agencies they are not the same person. Getting this straight explains a large share of “this policy is on my list but the commission isn’t” questions.
The three roles
Section titled “The three roles”| Role | What it means |
|---|---|
| Policy owner / client | The person who owns the policy |
| Licensed holder | The licensed agent whose name is on the carrier paperwork |
| Actual agent (producer) | The person who actually wrote the business |
Some agencies route every policy through a small number of licensed holders while the real producer is someone else — often a broker who is still working toward a licence. The carrier paperwork shows the holder; the commission belongs to whoever the agency says earned it.
How the platform handles it
Section titled “How the platform handles it”Two separate mechanisms:
- A license-holder flag. An agent record can be marked as a licence holder who is not an actual agent. Accounts like this must never receive commission, and the platform excludes them from commission paths rather than relying on the balance happening to be zero. Someone who is both a licence holder and a producing agent keeps their producing status — the exclusion applies only to holders who are not actual agents.
- A per-tenant switch for manual policy-to-agent mapping. When an agency turns this on, newly imported policies stop before they enter the policy table and wait for an operator to confirm the real producing agent. See Agent onboarding and mapping.
Both are tenant-level decisions. Two agencies can run completely different arrangements on the same platform.
What this means for the agent app
Section titled “What this means for the agent app”- A policy can appear on your list because you are the client’s advisor, because you are the policy owner’s advisor, or because you earned the commission — and those are not always the same set.
- A policy that is yours as a client relationship may legitimately produce no commission for you.
- A new agent may see clients before seeing income. Onboarding a licence, confirming a producer code, and mapping policies are separate steps; income appears only once the income-producing path is complete.
Where the platform refuses to guess
Section titled “Where the platform refuses to guess”When the platform cannot determine who earned a commission, it does not assign the policy to somebody. It records that the relationship is unconfirmed and shows it as such. Automatically assigning an unmapped policy would produce a number that looks authoritative and is simply wrong, which is worse than an explicit “pending”.
Operators work these cases in the mapping queue. An item stays there until a human decides, and turning the mapping switch off later does not release the items already waiting.