Applied Epic accounting for Canadian brokerages

Applied Epic is a broker management system first

Applied Epic, made by Applied Systems, is the broker management system (BMS) that a large share of Canadian insurance brokerages run on. It manages clients, policies, carriers, activities, and documents — and it also includes an accounting module that maintains a general ledger and ties your financial records to the policy and billing data already in the system.

That last point is the whole reason Epic accounting matters. In a brokerage, the accounting is the billing: premiums collected, premiums payable to insurers, commissions earned, and producer compensation all flow from policy transactions. When the accounting lives in the same system as the policies, those numbers reconcile from one source. When it doesn’t, they don’t.

What the Applied Epic accounting module actually does

Configured and used properly, the accounting module handles:

• The general ledger — your chart of accounts, journal entries, and financial statements.
• Direct bill and agency bill — two fundamentally different billing flows (more below) that each need their own handling.
• Premium trust — tracking money you hold on behalf of clients and insurers separately from operating funds.
• Carrier reconciliation — matching insurer statements to what Epic recorded on the policies.
• Commission accounting — recognizing commission income and tracking what producers and sub-brokers are owed.
• Month-end close — bringing all of the above together into a closed, reportable period.

Direct bill vs agency bill in Epic

The single biggest source of confusion in brokerage accounting is the difference between agency bill and direct bill, and Epic models them differently.

• Agency bill: the brokerage invoices the client, collects the premium (usually into trust), keeps its commission, and remits the balance to the insurer. The brokerage’s books carry the premium and the payable to the insurer.
• Direct bill: the insurer bills and collects from the client directly, then pays the brokerage its commission, often via a statement. The brokerage’s books mainly track the commission earned and receivable.

Getting these set up correctly in Epic is what makes commissions and premiums payable tie out later. Getting them wrong is what produces mystery balances at year-end.

Premium trust in Epic

Canadian brokers are generally expected to hold client and insurer premium in a segregated trust account, separate from operating money, and to reconcile it regularly. The exact requirements are set by your provincial regulator, so confirm them with your regulator — but in every province the accounting job is the same: know, every month, whether the money in trust is enough to cover what you owe out of trust. Epic can track the trust ledger, but the monthly reconciliation between the trust bank balance and the trust liability still has to be performed and documented.

Where Epic accounting goes wrong

The most common failure pattern is simple: the accounting module was never fully configured, or the person who understood it left, so staff quietly start doing the “real” accounting in spreadsheets. Epic keeps recording policy transactions, but the GL, the trust reconciliation, and the carrier matching fall behind. Months later, nothing ties out and year-end becomes a forensic exercise.

The fix is not to abandon Epic — it’s to use it the way it was designed: configure the GL and reconciliation settings correctly, run the direct- and agency-bill workflows consistently, and close every month inside the system.

Month-end close in Applied Epic

A reliable Epic close runs on a calendar and covers, at minimum:

1. Bank and trust reconciliation.
2. Carrier statement matching (agency and direct bill).
3. Direct-bill commission reconciliation.
4. Accruals and adjusting entries.
5. Closing the general ledger period and producing the financial package.

When those steps happen every month, year-end is just another close — and your trust position, commissions, and premiums payable are trustworthy all year.

Getting help with Applied Epic accounting

BrokerLedger does brokerage accounting in Applied Epic — setting up or cleaning up the accounting module, reconciling trust and carriers, and running month-end close — so the system you already pay for actually does its job. If your Epic accounting has drifted, a discovery call is the fastest way to find out what it would take to get it back on track.