RM Assistant vs Manual Submission Intake
Manual intake costs 45 to 90 minutes of skilled time per submission and produces no audit trail; automated intake costs a few minutes and produces a field-level trail, but is only worth the change above a certain volume.
The short answer
Manual intake is the default in most MGAs, program administrators and wholesale brokerages: a person opens each attachment on a broker's email, reads it, and types the values into the policy administration system.
Manual intake costs 45 to 90 minutes of skilled time per submission and produces no audit trail; automated intake costs a few minutes and produces a field-level trail, but is only worth the change above a certain volume.
Which one you should actually pick
Including the cases where we are not the right answer.
Choose manual intake if…
- You process a small number of submissions a month, where the total manual cost is genuinely low and any change programme would cost more than it saves.
- Your submissions are highly uniform and already arrive as structured data rather than as email attachments.
- You are mid-migration on your policy administration system and would rather not add a second moving part until that settles.
Choose RM Assistant if…
- Intake time is visibly constraining how many submissions your team can clear, and the answer so far has been to hire.
- You are losing business to whoever quotes first, and a meaningful part of your turnaround is spent typing rather than deciding.
- You need to show, months or years later, where a rated value came from — for an E&O question, a carrier audit or a loss-ratio review.
- Volume is seasonal or spiky, and headcount is a poor instrument for absorbing it.
Side by side
| Dimension | RM Assistant | manual intake |
|---|---|---|
| Time per submission | About 4 minutes end to end | 45 to 90 minutes of skilled time |
| Who does the work | Software extracts; a person reviews and approves | An underwriter or experienced processor keys every field |
| Cost behaviour | Scales with submission volume | Scales with headcount, hired in whole people |
| Volume spikes | Processed as they arrive | Become a backlog or a hiring decision |
| Error profile | Uncertain fields flagged for a human before posting | Transposition and omission errors are invisible until a claim |
| Audit trail | Every field traces to a source document and page | Reconstructed by hand from the original email, if at all |
| Setup effort | Field mapping and a system-of-record connection, typically weeks | None — it is what you already do |
| Broker experience | Unchanged; they keep emailing submissions | Unchanged |
Questions about this comparison
Is automated submission intake actually faster than a good processor?
For the extraction step, substantially — minutes rather than most of an hour, because the software reads every attachment in parallel and does not tire on the eleventh loss-run page. A skilled processor remains better at judgement calls, which is exactly why the workflow keeps a human approval step rather than replacing the person.
At what volume does automation start to pay for itself?
It depends on document mix more than on raw count, because a trucking submission with a large schedule and multi-carrier loss runs is several times the work of a simple monoline risk. The honest way to answer it is to measure your own average intake time and multiply by your loaded hourly cost, which is why we benchmark on your historical submissions before quoting.
What is the real risk of manual intake, beyond the time cost?
Silent errors. A transposed VIN or a missed loss-run row does not announce itself; it becomes a mis-rate, and it surfaces at claim time or in a deteriorating loss ratio. Because manual entry leaves no trail from the record back to the source page, diagnosing it afterwards is difficult.
Decide it on your own submissions
The only comparison that settles anything is running the same real submission through both. We will do our half in 30 minutes.
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