Submission intake

In commercial lines, a submission almost always arrives as an email with attachments rather than through a structured form. Those attachments typically include one or more ACORD applications, loss runs from the prior carriers, and, depending on the line, a schedule of vehicles, driver lists, motor vehicle records or program-specific supplementals.

Traditional intake is manual. A person opens each attachment, reads it, and re-keys the values into the policy administration system. In commercial trucking and other document-heavy lines this commonly takes 45 to 90 minutes per submission, and it is usually performed by underwriters or experienced processors rather than junior staff, because interpreting the documents requires domain knowledge.

Because intake sits at the very front of the workflow, it governs total quote turnaround. A submission cannot be rated until it has been read. This is why intake, rather than rating or binding, is usually the binding constraint on how many submissions a team can handle, and why capacity in most MGAs is measured in people rather than in systems.

Submission intake automation replaces the re-keying step: software classifies each document, extracts the fields, scores its own confidence, and presents a structured record for human approval before it is written downstream.