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Agency · Vol. 65 · No. 03

Reading your carrier statement like an owner, not an accountant.

Carrier statements hide a lot. Here's what to look for to understand the real profitability of each relationship.

Ryan Schumacher, CPA, Partner, Insurance Practice · September 2026 · 8 min read

Carrier statements weren't designed to be read by humans. They were designed to be processed. The result is that most agency owners — even very sophisticated ones — have a vague sense of which carriers are 'good for us' rather than a precise number.

What a statement actually tells you

Strip a statement down to its components and you're looking at: written vs. earned premium, new vs. renewal commission, contingency or supplemental compensation, and chargebacks. Each of those tells a different story about the relationship.

"Most agency owners have a vague sense of which carriers are good for us. Almost none have a number."

The four questions every statement should answer

• ·What's the all-in commission rate, including contingencies, by line of business?
• ·What's the loss ratio trend that's actually driving the contingency?
• ·How much chargeback risk is sitting in the unearned portion?
• ·Is the carrier consuming more service time than it's paying for?

Carrier profitability is not the same as carrier revenue

A carrier that pays a 12% commission but consumes 40% of your CSR time is not your most profitable carrier — even if it sits at the top of your revenue report. We routinely find that the third- or fourth-largest carrier by revenue is the single most profitable line of business once allocated cost is factored in.

What we actually look at

For our agency clients, we build a carrier-level profitability dashboard that ties revenue, contingency timing, allocated service cost, and loss-ratio trends into a single view. The conversations that come out of those dashboards — about which markets to grow into, which to taper out of, which producers to deploy where — are usually where the firm earns its keep.

Ready to see the real profitability behind your carrier relationships?

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