How to automate bordereaux
You're spending 2 days a quarter building BDX in Excel. Here's how to make it automatic.
If you're running an MGA, you know the drill. Every quarter (or every month, if you're unlucky), someone on your team stops what they're doing and starts building bordereaux. They pull policy data from one place, premium data from another, calculate stamp duty by hand, format everything into the carrier's template, and send it off, hoping nothing's missing. Bordereaux management software exists to eliminate this entirely.
What goes into a bordereaux
A premium bordereaux typically contains:
- Policy details: policy number, insured name, inception and expiry dates, risk class
- Premium: gross premium, net premium, commission deductions
- Tax and stamp duty: calculated per jurisdiction, weighted across multi-state or multi-territory policies
- Risk location: where the risk is situated, which drives tax calculations
- Participant shares: for consortium or multi-carrier arrangements, each carrier's line percentage and their proportional premium
- Claims data: for claims bordereaux: date of loss, reserves, payments, and claim status
Why manual BDX is painful
The data for a single bordereaux typically lives in three or more places:
- Policy details in the underwriting system (or a spreadsheet)
- Premium collection status in the bank or accounting system
- Claims data in email threads or yet another spreadsheet
Your ops team has to pull data from all of these, cross-reference to determine what's been collected since the last report, calculate tax, and format the output. Every carrier has a different template: different column names, different field orders, different levels of detail required. A medium-sized MGA with five carrier relationships might spend 10 days per quarter just on bordereaux reporting.
And the report is already stale. By the time you've compiled it, more policies have been bound and more premium has been collected. The carrier is making decisions based on data that's weeks old.
The trigger-based approach
Bordereaux automation works by generating BDX entries at the point of transaction rather than compiling reports retrospectively. The key insight is that a bordereaux is not a standalone document. It's a view of data that already exists.
When premium is received and reconciled against a policy:
- The policy details are already recorded from the bind
- The premium amount is confirmed by the reconciliation
- Stamp duty is calculated automatically based on the risk jurisdiction
- The BDX entry is created in the carrier's configured format
The bordereaux builds itself, line by line, as transactions happen. When the carrier wants a report, it's already there: complete, accurate, and current.
Stamp duty: the hidden complexity
Stamp duty calculation is one of the reasons manual bordereaux is so error-prone. In Australia, stamp duty rates vary by state and territory. A single policy can cover risks across multiple jurisdictions, requiring the premium to be apportioned and stamp duty calculated for each.
Automated stamp duty calculation insurance means these rules are applied consistently and accurately. No more looking up rates in a table, no more manual apportionment, no more errors that get flagged months later.
What "good" looks like
When bordereaux automation is working properly:
- The carrier gets a clean, standardised report within hours of premium landing, not weeks later
- Stamp duty is calculated automatically and correctly for every jurisdiction
- Multi-carrier arrangements are handled, and each participant gets their proportional BDX
- Claims bordereaux is generated from the same system, connected to the policy and premium record
- Your ops team stops building spreadsheets and starts doing actual operations work
Getting started
If you're still building bordereaux in Excel, the first step is getting your policy, premium, and claims data into a single system. That's what BBNET does. It's the shared ledger that connects the bind to the payment to the BDX, so the report writes itself.