Nine carriers answered. Now build the comparison.
The quotes arrive as nine different documents, on nine different layouts, over three weeks. Somebody has to pull the rates out of each one, line them up against the plan you actually asked for, and turn the result into something a client can decide from. That is the part that takes the evening.
A group with no coverage in place
Marketed on demographics and the plan design you are targeting. There is no booklet to transcribe and no history to send, so nothing waits on either.
A group you already administer
A remarket: the booklet on file becomes the design carriers are asked to match, and the claims and premium history goes with it. An underwriter pricing a group they have never seen wants both.
Or a renewal tested against the market
Marketing and renewals are separate exercises here, and either runs on its own. A renewal being sounded out carries a lighter record — no census, no design options — because that is the shape of that job, not a cut-down version of this one.
A remarket wants two full years of claims and premium behind it, and says so when it does not have them — as something to acknowledge, not a wall. Some groups genuinely have less history than that, and a new group is never asked for any.
Quoting two designs is two markets — never one with more columns.
A cheaper carrier and a smaller plan look identical
Set an 80% coinsurance quote beside a 100% one and the 80% carrier reads as the good news. Every comparative figure — the premium columns, the coverage grid, the spread across carriers — is drawn inside a single design, so a difference the grid highlights is a difference between insurers rather than between plans.
What you asked for stays on the page
Where your request pinned a figure down, the grid carries a Requested column beside the answers, and a carrier who came back with something else is marked as off the design you asked for — not as an outlier among the others. Matching the request is not being unusual.
The presentation and the editable proposal are built from the same view of the market, so the document you send and the one you edit cannot drift into disagreeing about which carrier won on what.
The design written out, and the booklet it came from.
The RFP carries the plan design transcribed line by line, and attaches the client’s own booklet alongside it. An underwriter asked to match current coverage then prices from the document the employees actually hold, rather than from somebody’s summary of it.
A booklet that is missing, unreadable or too large to send never stops the RFP going out — it degrades to the written design and goes anyway. A market that waits on a file conversion is a market that misses its window.
Rates, not the premium printed beside them
What gets stored off a quote is the unit rate. The monthly premium on the page was struck against that carrier’s own assumed census — carry it across and a twelve-life group prices at twelve times its cost.
The incumbent is two columns, not one
What the group pays today and what the incumbent is asking for renewal are different figures under the same carrier’s name. They are kept apart deliberately; collapse them and the “what you pay now” column quietly becomes the renewal ask.
A summary someone else built still reads
A client coming over usually arrives holding the marketing report from their last broker — the incumbent and every carrier that replied, in one grid. That reads too, one carrier column at a time, rather than only the individual quote letters behind it.
Coverage tiers are read as the policy actually runs them — two, three or four — because the same insurer quotes Single and Family for one group and Single, Couple, Single Parent and Family for the next. Where a carrier priced no couple tier, the presentation does not invent a couple row to fill the gap: a family rate printed under a Couple heading is a figure their document does not contain, and it would be carried to the client as quoted.
Every carrier is listed. The side-by-side is the finalists.
The Marketing Results page names every insurer that answered, with their rate caps, their guarantees and their notes. The detailed coverage grid that follows is capped at a readable few — and one sentence on the page says which carriers are in it, printed from the same source in every format, so two surfaces can never quietly disagree about who was compared. You can override the shortlist and the cap.
A carrier who declined is a row of its own, with the reason they gave. Declines carry no rates, which is exactly what makes them easy to lose — and a sponsor asking why a particular insurer is not in the comparison deserves the answer rather than a gap.
A case nobody has priced yet will still render a Benefits Presentation — with empty premium columns. blankit stops and says so rather than letting you find out when the client opens it. It is a warning you can acknowledge and proceed past, because sometimes an empty comparison is genuinely what you want to walk someone through.
The finished document carries your firm’s name, logo and colours — not blankit’s. So does the editable version, if you would rather rework the narrative before it goes out.
Get the evening back.
We will take a market you have already worked and rebuild it in front of you — the RFP, the quotes, and the presentation the client ends up reading.