Data is business royalty. But for it to rule the day, your data must be accurate and accessible.

“When your account management team enters information into Applied Epic® as part of their workflow, audits can help ensure you’re capturing the data you need,” notes JC Mahan, Solutions Specialist at Applied.

Mahan identifies specific Applied Epic reports that can regularly measure a team’s adherence to agency workflows in the Benefits Audits and Reports That Can Improve Data Integrity on-demand workshop.

Top 4 Areas to Audit

The workshop details four main use cases for audit reports in Applied Epic: Accounts, Policies, Activities and Attachments.

Mahan demonstrates the best practice for exporting report data into Microsoft Excel, allowing you to pull in the data you want in the order you want. In addition, he explains how to:

• Modify your criteria: Measuring the fields most relevant to your business needs.
• Adjust your layout: Arranging data in the order you want it to appear in your report.
• Schedule delivery options: Identifying delivery format, email recipients, and how often you want to send reports.

For more tips on finding, measuring, and reporting on your most valuable data, let’s look at each area in Applied Epic.

Accounts

At the account level, your reports provide a big-picture overview. You can audit names, email addresses, job titles, and other information to help you target specific contacts. When this data is exported to Excel, you can use conditional formatting to highlight outdated or missing data. Best practice is to audit this account level detail quarterly, though an annual review is the most common.

Additional tips include:

• Add a task to your annual renewal activity to edit or update your contacts and Employee Benefits Tab.
• Capture dates of birth to send birthday wishes to your contacts.
• Capture contact classifications to send targeted information in Applied Epic and Applied Marketing Automation™.

Policies

Policies are your book of business, so you want to ensure data is clean and accurate. Expiration Reports and Policy List Reports are the go-to reports for this audit. Most users track this data monthly. For example, you might audit the past 180 days to capture missing data or policies that have not been renewed. This helps ensure that essential actions have been completed.

Additional tips include:

• To know everything about a policy, ensure you’ve entered key data – especially annual expected premium and commission. When you compile this data across all policies, you will know how your business is running.
• With a Policy Report, you can bring in account-level data from the Employee Benefits Tab and audit that information along with your policy audit.
• Ask your account managers to fill in or clean up the data as part of a monthly audit workflow.

Activities

Activities reports help you keep track of your team’s productivity and outstanding work. Users typically export this data to Excel weekly or monthly. These reports can highlight data for activities that are still open, enabling your team to finish past-due items. You can also examine closed activities to see how long it took to complete them. This can help you discover inefficiencies where, for example, an activity took eight days when it should have taken two.

Additional tips include:

• For renewal-specific activities with multiple associated tasks, you can ensure all tasks are completed promptly.
• If you use activity codes for servicing (like BBIL for billing, BCMP for compliance, or BCLM for claims), a report can show clients the services provided outside of renewal, such as bidding and spreadsheeting.

Attachments

Attachments reports ensure that your team attach the correct documents to policies or activities as part of their workflow. For example, you can check to see if attachments are correctly named, placed in the correct folders, and given the required level of security access.

Additional tips include:

• Send these reports weekly or monthly.
• Create naming conventions and workflows for how and where to save attachments. This will save time and effort when searching for them later.

Additional Education

Watch the on-demand workshop for more details and a demo of auditing reports in Applied Epic.