You feel it every renewal season: the duct tape between your AMS, your premium-finance tool, and your accounting. Here's where today's agency software tends to fall short, and where CIA Software closes the gap.
Plenty of agencies run a perfectly modern, cloud-based system, right up until they need real accounting or premium financing. The books get offloaded to a spreadsheet, financing runs through a separate tool, and when you ask for your own data back, some vendors charge you for the privilege.
How we're different: native finance, a real general ledger, support that answers, and your data is always free to export.
The largest names in agency software were built for big brokerages, and in some cases on database engines older than the internet. They're capable, but you pay five-figure annual bills, sign multi-year contracts, and train your staff on a feature surface a small auto agency will never touch.
How we're different: modern tech, pricing built for SMB agencies, no lock-in, and your data is never held hostage.
Some well-liked systems call themselves cloud, but you're really streaming a Windows app off someone's server. Accounting gets handed off to a separate bookkeeping product, and premium financing isn't built in at all.
How we're different: truly browser-native, with financing and a real GL already inside.
A comparative rater is great at quoting, but it isn't a management system, no policy lifecycle, no general ledger. Budget tools keep the price low by leaving out native premium finance and the workflows non-standard auto actually needs. Either way, you end up stitching the back office together yourself.
How we're different: one modern cockpit instead of a rater plus three side tools.
Dedicated premium-finance platforms are solid at what they do, but they're built for lenders and finance companies, not your agency. They live outside your AMS by design, so you quote in one system, finance in another, and reconcile two ledgers by hand every month.
How we're different: financing isn't a separate vendor. It's a tab in the order.
Single-machine, no real concurrency, finance numbers living in form controls, and one retirement away from nobody knowing how it works. It got you here. It will not get you where you're going.
How we're different: we were literally built by modernizing one of these.
The same four grievances, across every legacy platform.
Citrix lag, spinning cursors, screens that take three clicks and a deep breath. Tradecraft is sub-second from anywhere, because it runs on the edge, not a server in the closet.
Two logins, two ledgers, monthly reconciliation by hand. We made premium financing part of the order, so it posts once and ties out by itself.
Export to a spreadsheet, fight the variance, never quite trust the number. Our GL balances to the cent on every posting, or it doesn't post.
Roll-ups and acquisitions turned your vendor into a ticket queue. We're a focused team that picks up the phone and knows auto agencies cold.
We pull your customers, policies, orders, receipts, finance contracts, and ledger out of your current system, schema and logic, no guesswork.
We recompute your AR, GL, and finance balances and verify them to the cent against your source data. If anything is off, we find it before go-live, not after.
You go live on a balanced book with everyone's clearance set and the old system safely archived. No mystery variances, no lost history.
This isn't theory. Tradecraft was built by migrating a real, 163-table auto-agency system, reconciling every balance to the cent, and proving 100% balanced journals against live production orders.
No. Tradecraft runs your in-house financing natively, and we can model your finance terms, setup fees, and carrier allocations. You stop paying for a separate platform and stop reconciling two systems.
Real double-entry accounting: chart of accounts, AR/AP, receipts, commissions, deposits, carrier-statement reconciliation, trial balance, and period close. Every entry balances.
Both, each with the correct GL treatment, the journal posts differently for AB and DB automatically.
Coverage letters, finance contracts, and renewal notices generate in any language, driven by each insured's language preference.
It depends on your data and how clean it is. The reconciliation work, making sure every balance ties out, is what we take seriously. We'll scope it honestly in your briefing.
