Underwrite an Account and Deliver a Polished Proposal in 30 Minutes: A Walkthrough

Last week we said a PEO on HALO IQ can underwrite an account and deliver a polished proposal in about thirty minutes. This week we are going to show the clock. What follows is a hypothetical walkthrough: the company, the numbers, and the people are invented to illustrate the flow, and the timings are what the flow is designed for, not a claim about any specific deal. We are not going to put dollar figures on a made-up account. We are going to show you what each minute is spent on, and why the steps that used to take days now take minutes.

The setup: a broker in the HALO PEO Marketplace has a client, a hypothetical 95-employee HVAC contractor in California with installation, service, and office staff. The broker has sent the submission to a PEO matched through the marketplace. The PEO's underwriter, call her the underwriter, is sitting down at 9:00 a.m.

Minutes 0 to 4: the submission arrives and parses itself

At 9:00 the broker's submission lands in the PEO's workspace. Because the broker used InboxIQ at intake, the email with its attachments has already been processed. Three years of loss runs from two carriers, an ACORD 130, a census spreadsheet, and the current dec page have each been classified by document type, matched to the client record, and attached to a deal that ConnectIQ created automatically.

The parsing ran deterministically first. The loss runs came from carriers whose templates InboxIQ recognizes, so the extraction used pdftotext and the known-format rules, which means the claim rows, valuation dates, paid and incurred amounts, and open reserves are already structured. One of the three loss-run PDFs was a scanned image from the older carrier; the deterministic parser could not read it, so the AI fallback extracted it and flagged the extraction for review. The ACORD 130's class codes, payroll by class, and prior coverage were pulled into the deal. The census was parsed into employee rows with dates of birth, zip codes, and coverage tiers.

The underwriter opens the deal at 9:01 and sees all of this laid out. She spends three minutes doing what a person should do: checking the AI-extracted loss run against the scanned PDF, confirming the claim count matches, and accepting the extraction. She notes the ACORD shows three class codes: the HVAC installation and service class, a clerical class, and an outside sales class. By 9:04 the submission is verified and nothing has been re-keyed.

Minutes 4 to 11: ModIQ

At 9:04 she opens ModIQ. The loss runs are already aggregated by policy year across both carriers, with the valuation dates called out and the gap between the carriers' policy periods identified. She sees the open claims: two from the most recent year with reserves that look large for the injury descriptions, and one from two years ago that appears closed on the newer run but open on the older one.

ModIQ projects the mod from the aggregated losses and the payroll by class, using the WCIRB formula, since this is a California account. The projection comes with its components visible: expected losses, actual primary and excess losses, credibility. She runs a loss pick alongside it, with the LDF, Bornhuetter-Ferguson, and Cape Cod methods shown and a credibility-blended result, and she applies the open-reserve margin load because of those two large reserves. She requests the official WCIRB worksheet through ModIQ so the packet will carry the bureau's figures and not only her projection.

At 9:09 she writes a two-line note on the deal: the mod projection, the open-claim concern, and a recommendation to ask the broker whether the older claim was in fact closed. The question goes into the shared deal, and the broker will see it. By 9:11 the WC analysis is done.

Minutes 11 to 15: CarrierIQ

At 9:11 she opens CarrierIQ to see where the PEO's master policy rates sit for these three classes in California. CarrierIQ holds the WCIRB pure premium rates and the carrier's filed multiplier for the PEO's program, and it shows the manual rate per class with the effective date of the filing it came from. Nothing is flagged stale; the current-year filing is loaded. She also glances at where the client's current carrier, named on the dec page, prices the same classes, so she knows the competitive landscape before she quotes.

Four minutes, most of it reading. At 9:15 she has the rates.

Minutes 15 to 19: PricingIQ

At 9:15 the pricing step runs mostly on its own. PricingIQ pulls the PEO's catalog defaults for a 95-employee account: the admin fee schedule for that headcount band, the WC load the PEO's rules specify for the HVAC class, the standard load for clerical and outside sales, and the additional fees that apply. She reviews the components. The HVAC load rule has fired as expected. She considers a slightly sharper admin fee given the competitive situation the broker described, drops it, and the rule catches that it is below the soft floor. The approval routes to the sales manager with the margin impact displayed. The manager, who is at his desk, approves it inside the deal view.

Every pricing component is saved with the quote at 9:19: the rates, the loads, the fee schedule, the approval, and who gave it.

Minutes 19 to 25: the wizard

At 9:19 she opens the proposal wizard. Company Basics is already populated from the ACORD and the census. The Workers' Comp step shows the class codes, the payroll, the manual rates from CarrierIQ, the loads from PricingIQ, the mod projection from ModIQ, and the comparison against the client's current premium from the dec page. She confirms it. The Benefits Analysis step reads the census and the PEO's master plan contribution assumptions; she selects the contribution strategy the PEO uses for contractors of this size. The Investment Analysis step computes hard costs from the priced components, pulls the additional fees from the catalog so they appear on the proposal, and offers the soft-cost fields from the broker's discovery notes, which say the owner spends roughly a morning a week on HR. She enters that as the broker reported it, with the source noted.

By 9:25 the structured proposal data is complete and has passed every rule.

Minutes 25 to 28: Executive Summary AI

At 9:25 she asks Executive Summary AI to draft the narrative. It reads the structured data from every wizard step and writes an executive summary: the client's situation, the WC analysis with the mod and open-claim observations, the benefits comparison, the investment analysis with hard and soft costs kept apart, and the additional fees stated. It does not invent a number; everything it cites is in the wizard.

She reads it, which is the part that cannot be skipped. She cuts a sentence that overstates the soft-cost case, adds a line about the open-claim question for the broker, and tightens the close. Three minutes. At 9:28 the narrative is hers.

Minutes 28 to 30: CanvasIQ and the share link

At 9:28 she opens CanvasIQ. The PEO's proposal template is already configured: cover, executive summary, WC analysis, benefits, investment analysis, fees, about the PEO. The wizard data flows into the blocks. She looks at the rendered proposal, swaps the cover image for the one the PEO uses for construction trades, and publishes. CanvasIQ creates a snapshot of the proposal as published, so what the broker's client sees is frozen even if the deal data changes later, and produces a share link with view tracking.

At 9:30 the link is in the broker's workspace. The broker sees the proposal arrive, reviews it, and forwards it to the client. The underwriter sees, later that morning, that the client opened it.

What the thirty minutes were actually spent on

Look back at the clock. Almost none of the thirty minutes went to the work that used to consume days: keying in loss runs, building a policy-year aggregation in a spreadsheet, looking up rates, assembling a document. Those steps ran in seconds, deterministically where the format was known and with AI where it was not. The minutes went to the things a person should be doing: checking an extraction, judging an open reserve, deciding on a load, approving a discount, editing a narrative, looking at the finished page before it goes out.

That is the design principle behind HALO IQ. AI is in the parsing, the rating, the narrative, and the CRM intelligence, and it is there to remove the re-keying and the assembly, not the judgment. The thirty minutes are thirty minutes of judgment.

An invitation

The walkthrough above is hypothetical, but the flow is the real one, and it is the flow a PEO gets in its workspace the day it joins the HALO PEO Marketplace. Brokers who bring a submission through the marketplace get a PEO on the other side who can turn it around in a morning rather than a fortnight. PEOs who join get submissions that arrive already parsed and a workspace that carries them to a published proposal.

The marketplace is free for the first year. A credit card is required at signup so that everyone in it is a real company; it is not charged during that year. Every new member gets a free one-hour setup call, and the best use of that hour is exactly what this post described: a real deal, start to finish, with the clock running.