- A 20-person commercial agency handling around 60 accounts a month spends roughly 120 hours on document work: comparing quotes, building proposals, and reworking both.
- None of that time is advice. It is transcription, formatting, and reconciliation.
- Automating the document pass takes a typical account from about two hours to about ten minutes.
- That is around 110 hours a month, or most of a full-time role, returned to the team.
The hours do not disappear in one dramatic place. They leak, thirty and ninety minutes at a time, from every account the agency touches. By the end of the month they add up to a full-time job nobody budgeted for and nobody enjoys.
This walkthrough is illustrative. It uses a representative 20-person commercial agency and industry-typical volumes to show the arithmetic, rather than reporting one customer’s books. For figures from named CopyCat customers, see the case studies, including an agency that doubled output and added $5M in annual premium in four months, and a benefits brokerage that took workbook creation from five hours to ten minutes.
Where 120 hours a month actually goes
Take an agency writing about 60 accounts a month across new business and renewals. Ask what happens between the carrier quotes arriving and the client receiving something they can decide from.
| Step | Time per account | Monthly at 60 accounts |
|---|---|---|
| Reading and normalizing carrier quotes | 25 min | 25 hrs |
| Building the side-by-side comparison | 30 min | 30 hrs |
| Assembling the branded proposal | 40 min | 40 hrs |
| Checking figures against the source documents | 15 min | 15 hrs |
| Revisions after the first review | 10 min | 10 hrs |
| Total | 2 hrs | 120 hrs |
Two hours per account is not a pessimistic number. Most agencies land between 30 and 90 minutes on the proposal alone, before the comparison, the checking, and the round of revisions that follows the first draft.
The important part is not the total. It is that no line in that table is advice. Every one of them is a producer or account manager moving numbers from one document into another and making sure they arrived intact.
What changes
Automating the document pass does not remove the broker from the decision. It removes the reconstruction that happens before the conversation starts.
- Upload the carrier quotes, however they arrived: PDF, Lloyd’s slip, MGA binder, scanned email attachment.
- CopyCat extracts limits, sublimits, deductibles, exclusions, and premium, and ties every value to the page it came from.
- The side-by-side comparison and the renewal analysis come out of the same pass, so nothing is entered twice.
- The proposal builds in the agency’s own template, with its branding and section structure.
- A producer reviews, edits anything that needs judgment, and exports the client-ready PDF.
Ten minutes per account across 60 accounts is 10 hours. Against 120, that is roughly 110 hours a month back, which is most of a full-time role. The agency did not find those hours by working later. It stopped spending them on transcription.
What the recovered time is worth
Hours saved is the wrong headline on its own. What matters is what the capacity turns into.
- More accounts through the same team. One published CopyCat customer, a 20-person commercial agency, doubled output and added $5 million in annual premium within four months of making cited analysis the first step on every account.
- Faster client decisions, because the comparison arrives before the meeting rather than being explained during it.
- Less E&O exposure, because every figure in the document links back to the carrier page it came from and the coverage changes on a renewal are written down rather than mentioned.
- Better Q4 and January renewals, when the manual version of this work is what pushes teams into nights and weekends.
Run the arithmetic on your own book
You do not need a study. Take one recent commercial account, count the carrier quotes, and time what it took to get from those PDFs to something you would send a client. Multiply by the accounts you touch in a month.
Whatever number comes out is the size of the problem. If it is large, the useful next step is not a demo of a prepared sample. It is running your own worst carrier PDF and your own template through the tool and seeing what comes back.
See how CopyCat generates commercial insurance proposals, compares quotes with citations, or read the customer case studies for figures from named agencies.