New-business and renewal submission portals
A renewal figure has a unit, a reporting period and sometimes a location. A portal needs to carry that context from the question the applicant sees to the record the reviewing team opens. Northline develops new-business and renewal submission applications.
Field definitions and validation
“Revenue” is not a complete field definition. The question may ask for a particular fiscal year, a requested 12-month period or an estimate for a future period. That choice belongs to the insurance business and needs to be explicit in the form.
We develop the fields around the supplied questions: labels, definitions, units, permitted responses and the context that must remain with them. Repeated premises need their own location references. A narrative description of services should not be forced into a numeric field.
Revenue
Specified fiscal year or requested 12-month period
A saved draft and a submitted version
| State | What the application should make clear |
|---|---|
| Draft | The applicant can continue an unfinished response. The record has not been represented as submitted. |
| Submitted version | The reviewing team can see the answers and attachments as supplied at that submission. |
| Question returned | The applicant can identify the question requiring clarification and the answer it relates to. |
| Later response | The new answer can be read alongside the earlier submitted version where the business process requires it. |
If an applicant edits a draft after submitting, the earlier submission should remain identifiable. Otherwise a reviewer may appear to be reading the submitted answer while the contents have changed underneath it. The exact version and resubmission behavior must be specified for the portal.
Document uploads
The upload needs a document type, a submission reference and a relationship to the requested item. Showing that a file exists does not establish that it is the document requested or that the information is complete.
Permitted file types, size limits, access and retention are agreed for the application. Where a later attachment replaces an earlier one, the reviewing screen should identify which version was supplied with which submission.
Missing answers and estimates
A form can check whether a required answer is missing, whether a date is in a usable format or whether a numeric field contains text. It cannot turn those checks into an insurer’s judgment about the business or its cover.
Empty, zero, unknown and not applicable have different meanings. Preserve an allowed unknown response instead of converting it to zero. If a question permits an estimate, the reviewing record needs that status as well as the number.
A portal beside the existing system
A submission application can operate alongside another insurance system. The connection needs to identify the submission, proposed term and related documents before transferring the information. A submission is not an issued policy simply because both contain a policyholder name.
We agree the application work, testing and maintenance around the system concerned. Start with the form and the destination record, including a returned question or corrected attachment, to identify what the connection must carry.