Approve/Deny Appointments

An appointment or termination request submitted on behalf of a producer through PLM to a state that approves and tracks company appointments is, almost without exception, processed electronically. The state's electronic response to an electronic request from PLM updates the appointment information on the producer's record automatically.

Before electronic processing was in wide usage, however, company licensing staff could generate a paper appointment form through Producer Manager Express Services, print it off, and mail it to a state insurance department. When the state's response arrived, it was necessary then to update the producer's record manually.

The Approve/Deny Appointments page was developed to make this task easier. It logs all appointment or termination requests submitted through Producer Manager that have a Submission Method of "Paper." Using the Approve/Deny Appointments page, a licensing staff member can mark paper requests as processed and then trigger the system to "batch-update" the records of the affected producers with the processing results.

As of 2009, PLM Producer Manager no longer processes paper appointment or termination requests. However, a very small number of states have proprietary transaction processing systems, to which PLM also cannot submit an electronic appointment or termination request.

For processing in these states, Vertafore offers customers our Vertafore Outsourcing Services. If your company subscribes to Vertafore Outsourcing Services, you can submit an appointment or termination request to one of these states through PLM, and the outsourcing team will intercept the request and process it on your company's behalf. Select any Submission Method except Record Only; the system automatically will mark the request as "Paper," thus flagging it for retrieval by the outsourcing team.

Consequently, the Approve/Deny Appointments page now is used primarily by the Vertafore Outsourcing Services team to batch-update your company's producer records with state responses to outsourced appointment and termination requests.

View screen capture

To open the Approve/Deny Appointments page, from the Licensing menu select Appointments, and then select Approve/Deny Appointments.

The Approve/Deny Appointments page contains the following sections:

Appointment Search

The Approve/Deny Appointments page works much like an inquiry in that you have to fill out search criteria to discover if any appointments or terminations need manual processing. Complete one or more of the following fields to define your search:

Search Producer: Click to narrow the search criteria to appointment or termination requests for a specific individual or firm producer.
Submit Date: This is a required field and must be provided no matter what other fields you complete. EnterBeginandEnddates inmmddyyyyformat (e.g. 020220110). Or, use theCalendarpopup date picker ().
State or Company: Fill in one or both of these to find all of the appointments and terminations requests that need processing in a given state, by a given company, or for a given company in a specific state. Remember, only appointments and terminations that were submitted within the dates specified in theSubmit Datefields will be returned.
Submitting Staff Member: Select one or more staff members from this list box to limit the results to appointments that requested by specific people.
Business Unit: Select one or more business units from this list box to limit the results by business unit.
Search: Click to retrieve a list of matching appointment or termination requests. All of the pending appointments that match the search criteria are displayed.

Approve/Deny Appointments

Check all appointments and terminations in the search results that you want to record as approved or denied, and then complete the following fields:

Response Received Date:Required.The date defaults to the current date but can be changed to any date on or before the current date (expressed inmmddyyyyformat).
Actual Effective Date:Required for appointments; optional forterminations. If a date is not entered, the appointment is terminated using the requested effective date. The date must be filled and is expressed inmmddyyyyformat.
Approved: Click to set all checkmarked appointments and terminations to be recorded as approved. (The default setting is Approved).
Denied: Click to set all checkmarked appointments and terminations to be recorded as denied.
Rejection Reason:Enter the reason for the approval or denial.
Save: Click to save changes and refresh the Approve/Deny Appointments page. New selection criteria can be entered to continue processing appointment approvals/denials.
Cancel: Click to exit without saving changes.

Notes

Note: If your company subscribes to Vertafore Outsourcing Services, the Approve/Deny Appointments page is used by the outsourcing team to batch-update your company's producer records with state responses to outsourced appointment and termination requests. Customer usage of the Approve/Deny Appointments page in most cases is not necessary.

Note: Vertafore PLM Producer Manager does not generate paper appointment or termination forms. Unless your company subscribes to Vertafore Outsourcing Services, the system will ignore any appointment or termination request with aSubmission Methodof "Paper." For more information, see Add Appointments and Terminate Appointments.

Note: Vertafore Outsourcing Services processes the following transactions: a) Massachusetts individual and firm appointments and terminations; b) Florida individual appointments and terminations, and c) Arkansas firm appointments.If your company does not subscribe to Vertafore Outsourcing Services, we recommend processing these appointment or termination transactions directly through the state's proprietary transaction system and then returning to Producer Manager to add a "record-only" appointment to an affected producer's record. For more information about Vertafore Outsourcing Services, contact your Vertafore representative.