Most agencies will recognize data administration as a constraint only after operational drag becomes impossible to ignore. By then, they’ve already paid the cost in wasted staff time and decreased data reliability.

Why This Problem Stays Hidden

Data maintenance doesn’t announce itself. A departing producer will create immediate visibility and commotion – clients need transition, the book needs reassignment etc.

Yet most Enterprise Admins’ work happens in the background where leadership rarely sees it

Your admins will regularly spend hours managing team permissions in View Others (i.e. setting who can see Tasks, Activities, and/or Workflows employee-to-employee). They will also handle new employee configuration, post-merger employee config and cleanups, structure management, and many more.

The Delayed Feedback Loop in Agency Operations

The pattern repeats across administrative tasks:

  • Companies get misconfigured during initial setup, or change names, merge, dissolve
  • Some policies get assigned elsewhere after a data migration from an acquired agency
  • The accounting confusion surfaces months later when commission reconciliation fails
  • Someone starts arguing about commission split

The delayed feedback means agencies rarely connect the operational drag they experience to the data admin reality causing it.

Very often the effect of mistakes made in a hurry or unnoticed misconfigurations only get discovered months later. By then, nobody remembers what created the problem, so they treat the symptom (or leave it there, because ongoing admin keeps piling up).

Manual Administration Doesn’t Scale

At 10 employees, manual data maintenance seems reasonable. Updating employee permissions individually takes a while, but it’s manageable. Reassignments or department fixes are tedious, but they get done.

The same approaches collapse as you grow.

The transition happens gradually enough that you miss the point where manual processes become impossible to sustain. You add staff incrementally, or acquire agencies one at a time. The more people you have, the more often someone would leave on any given week.

Each addition seems manageable until suddenly it isn’t. Then you start wondering why admin work takes so long.

You don’t exactly wake up one day unable to maintain your data. Nothing explodes.

What strikes is the realization that your admin team spends half their time on maintenance that should be smooth and intuitive. Most of your admin work is completed on a tight schedule.

When you want to kick-off a new project, you will onboard those 50-100 new employees, but your admins will crunch heavy hours to make it happen. This doesn’t come without price in configuration mistakes or admin burnout.

Let’s talk about specifics. What can you make better and automate in your Applied Epic’s day-to-day data upkeep?

Applied Epic requires ongoing administrative maintenance across several operational domains. Understanding this landscape helps identify where manual processes create bottlenecks and where automation delivers value.

Administrative Domain Core Operations Why It Matters
Employee Configuration Set up security groups, servicing roles, commission splits, structure assignments, and view permissions across Epic’s various configuration screens. Employees can’t do their jobs without proper access and role configuration. Complete setup for one employee requires navigating 5-7 different Epic sections/views and can take days for a batch of new employees.
Servicing Team Change Transfer client and policy servicing responsibilities, producer assignments, and other servicing roles (if the team changes). Used during departures, territory realignments, and organizational restructuring. A single producer departure can affect 150+ clients and 600+ policies. This often involves changes going as far as modifying entire servicing teams per client and line.
Structure Group Management Define and maintain standardized combinations of agency, branch, department, and profit center codes, then assign employees to these groups (in Applied Epic this is done manually per employee, btw). Structures drive commission calculations, workflow routing, and financial reporting. Wrong structures mean incorrect commission payments. Maintaining consistency across 50+ employees without groups means tracking exceptions manually.
Company and Broker Configuration Manage issuing/billing flags, parent-child relationships, NAIC codes, and contact information for carriers and brokers. Incorrect billing configurations create accounting problems. One misconfigured company may affect hundreds of policies.
Policy Data Maintenance Update profit centers, issuing companies, premium payable entities, Pr/Br commissions, estimated premiums, and commission values on policy lines. Profit centers enable book segmentation analysis. Commission data feeds book valuation reports.
Agency Defined Categories Apply and manage internal tags on clients and policy lines for segmentation, exception handling, and custom reporting. Tags enable workflow automation and reporting exclusions native to Epic. Manual application across hundreds of accounts during segmentation projects creates weeks of data entry work.
Data Quality Governance Identify and correct outdated company records, missing commission data, incorrect NAIC codes, structure deviations, and billing plan mismatches. Data quality issues compound silently until they break reports or create accounting problems. Systematic audits catch drift before it creates operational problems. Reactive cleanup only addresses symptoms.

Wait! Can’t You Already Do That in Applied Epic?

If you are proficient in these tasks, you may have already noticed that things like reassignments are somewhat supported natively by Applied Epic.

The short answer is yes, many of these tasks can be handled natively via browser UI.
The real answer is that specific tasks are complex and get quirky.

What you are choosing is not whether you can do it – but whether you will do it consistently, reasonably fast, and the way you want.

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Let’s take the Workload Reassignments and changes to Servicing Teams as an example.

Yes, you are to reassign clients and policies of a producer to a different producer. Now come all the caveats. What if you want to:

  • make sure a single admin can perform more than 60 reassignments per month (yes, that’s roughly a single Enterprise Admin’s capacity)?
  • get a full view of how every servicing team setup looks per line and client’s policy?
  • reassign other servicing team members along with the reassignment of the departing producer?
  • check if the producer had a different servicing role in other policies?
  • split the reassigned policies between multiple producers?
  • get a preview of the changes you are about to make?
  • want to undo a mass change?
  • customize individual clients and policies granularly?

You can’t really do most of that. This means that first your Enterprise Administrator pushes a rigid, mass reassignment. Then you either forget about customizations, or handle minor changes record-by-record.

Enterprise Data Admins deserve recognition here, because this is their daily reality. Here’s a podcast episode and a word from our founder, Roman.

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Our founder, Roman Stepanenko, shares insights into challenges of data administrators and data conversion teams in insurance.

Discover the gaps in the process, and the reality of manual workflows of insurance's data people. They are some of the most hard-working and unnoticed 'silent teams'.

Data conversion analysts, business systems analysts, implementation specialists, and data admins keep large brokers going after agency acquisitions.

Understanding the Scale in Applied Epic’s Enterprise Administration

Each of these domains – and many more specific tasks – involves work that happens whether you have efficient tools or not. What varies is execution speed and whether the work happens systematically, or reactively when problems surface.

Employee configuration happens during onboarding but also during ongoing organizational changes. Workload Reassignments happen during offboarding but also during territory realignments, post-acquisition integration, and capacity rebalancing.

The scale problem emerges when these operations touch dozens, hundreds, or thousands of records:

  • Structure changes during an acquisition affect 50 employees simultaneously
  • Profit Center Refinement touches 2,000 policies across your entire personal lines book
  • Producer departure triggers a Workload Reassignment across 1,600 policy lines that need careful distribution among remaining staff
  • Data quality audits require reviewing every company and broker in your system to identify configuration errors one-by-one

Specific Tasks That Break at Scale

Let’s look at the workload behind Enterprise Admin activities. These aren’t abstract inefficiencies; they’re concrete tasks that agencies must complete regardless of whether they have efficient tools.

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Employee Management: The Compounding Effort

Adding a producer requires configuring all the employee details, setting View Others permissions (Tasks, Activities, Workflows) employee-to-employee, and creating commission splits. Each setting lives in a different Epic section, and they can get entirely different workflows.

The View Others permissions alone create a matrix problem. Add someone to a 10-person team, and you configure access relationships for all 10 existing members to see the new person’s Activities, Tasks, and Workflows. That’s 10+ individual permission updates for one hire.

The thing is, you can’t really see this web of relationships, but you go profile-to-profile to define which employees and which work items the given user can see. If you set up a whole team from scratch it means reviewing and settings dozens upon dozens of View Others.

Technically, you could keep track of it in a spreadsheet… but in the end you still need to go individual employees in Epic to enforce updates.

Workload Reassignments: What Departures Leave Behind

Departures scatter data orphans across your system. You run Book of Business reports to find what they serviced. You check Activity Reports to see what they created. You review Policy Servicing Contacts across potentially hundreds of accounts.

Orphaned data will still happen, because who said that a producer will always appear as a producer on a servicing team. It’s impossible to remember and bring up all the roles and resulting realtionships of a given employee.

A single admin can reasonably handle 60 Workload Reassignments spread over a month.

Each client needs new servicing contacts. Each activity template might have the departed employee as default assignee. Miss any of these, and you have records pointing to inactive users that confuse staff trying to understand who owns what, or pollute reporting.

The errors stay invisible until someone stumbles across them weeks later when the context has been forgotten.

Company Configuration: Where Accounting Goes Wrong

Applied Epic distinguishes between companies you issue policies with and companies you bill through. This distinction matters because it determines how money flows and where it gets recorded.

Select wrong billing configuration, and accounting reports show incorrect receivables. You create unnecessary general ledger subaccounts that confuse bookkeepers. Commission reconciliation becomes a puzzle because the money flow doesn’t match Epic’s structure.

Agencies often default to marking companies as 'billing' when they shouldn’t be. The logic seems reasonable at the time – this is a carrier, carriers send us money, so mark them as billing.

Over time this creates a web of incorrect configurations affecting hundreds of policies.

Finding and fixing these requires understanding your book by company, identifying which policies use incorrect settings, and correcting each one before you can clean up the company configuration itself.

The Broker Type Confusion

Some agencies will check all three boxes because the distinctions aren’t immediately clear. Wrong configurations create commission calculation errors and muddy your book reports.

Just to clarify:

  1. Receivable brokers bill you and withhold their commission from what they send.
  2. Commissionable brokers produce business for you but aren’t employees on your payroll.
  3. Premium payable brokers represent markets you place business through for surplus lines or specialty coverage.

Policy Data: Silent Integrity Erosion

Agencies use Profit Centers to segment their book for financial analysis. Personal lines might split into tiers based on premium size. High-value above $15,000. Mid-market between $5,500 and $15,000. Small accounts below $5,500.

Commercial lines might be separated by industry vertical like construction, manufacturing, or professional services.

These designations only work if they’re accurate.

Profit centers live at the policy level, not the client level. When clients move between tiers because their premium grows or shrinks, or when you refine your segmentation strategy to add new categories, someone needs to update potentially thousands of policies.

Do this manually and it takes weeks. During those weeks, your financial reporting reflects outdated categorizations.

The Missing Commission Data Problem

Estimated Commission and Premium Fields feed into Book of Business reports that value your agency. Many policies – particularly in benefits lines – lack this data because carriers don’t provide estimated values in electronic downloads.

Without estimated values, your book appears smaller than in reality. Your producers’ book reports undercount their actual production. Your financial projections understate expected commission income.

Why Epic’s Interface Creates These Problems

Applied Epic’s interface assumes you work with one record at a time. This serves account managers and producers exceptionally well. They benefit from seeing everything about a single client in one place.

The same design becomes a constraint for administrative work operating across many records.

To update 200 employee permissions, you open 200 employee records individually. To fix profit centers on 500 policies, you navigate to 500 policy screens one by one. The interface doesn’t provide alternative paths for this type of work because it wasn’t designed for it.

Certain updates require multi-step workarounds because Epic locks fields after initial setup. Policy department assignments get locked after issuance. To change a department, you must renew or copy the policy, roll back effective dates, cancel the original flat, and mark it as entered in error.

These safeguards exists to prevent casual changes, but create friction for legitimate cleanup efforts.

Working one record at a time means you can’t see patterns and outliers.

A company misconfiguration affecting 300 policies only becomes apparent if you generate the right report. Employees whose structure assignments deviate from standard patterns remain invisible unless you manually review each one.

What Applied Epic Agencies Gain by Automating Admin Tasks

Instead of navigating screens one record at a time, you work with structured data exports. Spreadsheets showing hundreds or thousands of records simultaneously.

This shift from individual record interaction to aggregate data manipulation changes what’s achievable.

Applied Epic automation doesn’t bypass the system’s validation logic. It applies that logic through a different interface optimized for administrative work at scale. The same validation rules apply (with rare exceptions). Overall, the same business logic executes.

The difference lies in how freely your Enterprise Administrators interact with the data.

Download your employee structures to Excel. Sort by department, branch, and profit center. You immediately see who deviates from expected patterns.

Export policies by issuing company and see which ones need adjustments to Pr/Br commissions. Sort by profit center and identify policies miscategorized in ways that distort your financial reporting. Review company configurations in aggregate and find billing flags that shouldn’t be there.

This added visibility alone changes how you approach data maintenance. Instead of reactive cleanup when someone reports an issue weeks after creation, you systematically review and correct data quality on regular schedules.

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How Powerful Automation Can Be in Applied Epic

Applied Epic automation changes what’s actually possible for Enterprise Administrators. The shift isn’t just about speed. It’s about moving from reactive firefighting to systematic data management.

What becomes possible:

  • pattern visibility – see configuration drifts across 200 employees or 500 policies instead of hoping to spot problems one record at a time
  • batch operations with validation – update profit centers on 2,000 policies while Epic’s, and see any validation failures at once
  • increased capacity – you don’t need more hours to complete admin tasks, e.g. 60 workload reassignments per month are not a limit any longer
  • reviews before commit – preview complete workload reassignment before pushing changes, catching mistakes that would take weeks to unwind
  • customizable bulk operations – gain flexibility in editing records e.g. change multiple servicing team members at once, change structures on 20 out of all edited records to be different etc.
  • systematic audits – monthly data reviews and quarterly quality checks become routine instead of aspirational or crisis responses

What Automating Data Administration Means for Operations

Your Enterprise Admin team stops spending half their time on repeat updates, and you stop hiring admins to mash UI click-by-click. That capacity redirects toward analysis that identifies root causes, planning that prevents problems, and handling genuinely complex cases requiring human judgment.

Data quality improves because maintenance becomes sustainable. The gap between your intended data structure and actual reality shrinks. You don’t postpone cleanups and data quality checks until they become necessary projects.

Ultimately, better data feeds back into better decisions downstream, and things just start moving without drag.

The Competitive Dimension

Agencies that can execute strategic changes quickly respond better to market opportunities. When you need to realign territories, refine book segmentation, or integrate an acquisition, administrative work doesn’t bottleneck execution.

At 20 employees, manual processes seem acceptable. At 50, they’re painful but survivable. By 70+, enterprise administration becomes impossible without either accepting data quality degradation or dedicating staff full-time to maintenance that should be quick to handle.

Every agency hits this constraint. The question isn’t whether to automate admin work, but when.

The difference isn’t about budget or technology sophistication. It’s recognizing that data administration limits your agency’s operating speed and adaptability.

RecordLinker: Bulk Tools for Applied Epic Enterprise Administrators

RecordLinker handles bulk admin operations in Applied Epic. Enterprise administrators use it for tasks requiring simultaneous updates across hundreds or thousands of records.

Tasks RecordLinker Handles at Scale

  • employee configuration – set up flags, timezones, servicing roles, View Others and Signature Rights permissions across multiple employees simultaneously
  • workload reassignments – transfer client and policies when employees depart, customize entire servicing teams at once, preview your changes
  • structure management – define templated groups for structures and assign employees rather than update individual records, see when employees deviate from their preset
  • company configuration – review and correct issuing/billing flags, NAIC codes, and contacts across your entire carrier list
  • policy data maintenance – update profit centers, BrPr commissions, policy numbers, and estimated values on thousands of policies
  • data quality governance – run systematic audits that identify and list outdated companies, misspellings, inactive/renewal mismatch, and configuration drift

Applied Certified Integration Partner

Thanks to full two-way synchronization between RecordLinker and Applied Epic, your Enterprise Admin work can be enhanced beyond the default interface. This is possible thanks to continuous support from Applied Systems, and our official vendor partnership.

Your Epic Enterprise Administrators get filtering, flexible search, and bulk operations: employee creation/updates, Structure Group Management, View Others, Signature Rights, Workload Reassignments, Pr/Br Commissions, and many more.

How RecordLinker Works

RecordLinker partners with Applied Epic. The platform reads current data, generates filterable views and templated files for bulk change. It then validates updates against Epic’s business rules, and syncs approved changes back.

Export data to see the full scope. Make changes in a convenient interface or Excel templates where you can apply formulas and strategic logic. Review what will change before anything touches Epic. Approve and sync.

The RecordLinker platform bi-directionally integrates with Applied Epic through the official API. Synced data stays in Epic's governance model. Every update follows Epic's business rules. RecordLinker changes the efficiency of how admins interact with data by operating across many records.

Time To Value

What used to require days of individual record updates now takes hours.
Producer departures that would take a week to reassign become afternoon projects. Profit Center refinements affecting 2,000 policies move from ‘too painful to attempt’ to ‘let’s do this properly.’

Setup Timeline
RecordLinker needs a minimal setup. This typically takes up to a week. All that is required is processing a clearance with Applied Systems and pre-configuring the platform to your needs. No database access, no heavy integration, no IT risks.

Pricing
RecordLinker pricing scales with agency size. The platform is in use by agencies as small as 30 people all the way to national P&C brokers.

Trial access
A free trial allows your Enterprise Administrators to see exactly how bulk operations work with their specific tasks.

Request a Demo

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