Commission statement errors: the six types, and how to catch every one

Short-pay: the policy is on the statement, but the amount is under your contracted rate — a payment arrived, just light, which is why it's the hardest to catch by eye. Unpaid renewal: an active or renewed policy that should have generated commission and produced no line at all, hiding in the gap between your roster and the statement. Miscredit: the commission was paid, but to the wrong agent, sub-producer, or hierarchy level, so it settled without reaching you.

Uncatalogued payment: money lands for a policy that isn't in your book — sometimes genuinely owed, sometimes a sign your roster is stale. Duplicate: the same commission counted twice, which inflates a period and masks a shortfall elsewhere. Reversal / chargeback surprise: a clawback for a cancelled or NSF policy that you didn't expect and can't reconcile against anything, so it just quietly reduces the cheque. Every one is a mismatch between two lists, not an obvious error on either list alone.

The structural reason is one-sidedness. Carrier portals are built to report what the carrier did, not to audit whether the carrier was right — there's no column for "what you expected," so a short-pay and a correct payment look identical on the page. The volume compounds it: across hundreds of policies and a dozen carriers, no human is going to eyeball every line against a mental model of the contracted rate, so the errors that don't announce themselves survive by default.

And the individually-small-ness is deliberate cover. A single $40 short-pay isn't worth a phone call, so it isn't made — but a hundred of them across a year is real money, and they only become chase-able when they're aggregated into one list with a total attached. The error isn't hidden by malice; it's hidden by there being no cheap way to see it.

The method that catches every error type is the same: hold your expected commission — from your book of business — next to the carrier's actual payment, line by line, and look at the mismatches. A short-pay is a line where expected exceeds paid; an unpaid renewal is an expected value beside a blank; an uncatalogued payment is a paid amount with no match in your roster; a reversal is a negative line you can trace back. Each error type is a distinct shape of mismatch, so a single comparison surfaces all six at once.

reportr runs that reconciliation automatically: it reads the carrier portal you're already logged into, loads your book of business, and reconciles expected against paid — flagging short-paid, unpaid, and uncatalogued entries with the amount and the reason, then exporting the list as a branded report. The work stops being a line-by-line hunt and becomes a review of a flagged exceptions list, which is the only version of this that scales past a handful of policies.