If your rating tools live in Excel, you already know the drill. Files get emailed around, saved with names like rater_v3_FINAL_use-this-one.xlsx, and the results exist only as isolated snapshots on someone’s desktop, with no central record and no way to look back for analytics.
EASA changes that by surrounding your existing rating spreadsheets with the infrastructure they were always missing.
The Spreadsheet Storage Problem
Excel is extraordinarily good at calculations. Actuaries use it for rating models because it’s fast, flexible, and lets you encode complex business logic without writing a single line of traditional code. It does, however, store data as flat files, meaning each saved spreadsheet is an isolated record with no shared history of who ran what, with which inputs, and what the result was. When you distribute a rating tool across a team of underwriters, you’re generating dozens of disconnected copies rather than building a structured dataset.
This matters enormously when you want to ask questions like:
- How are underwriters using the rater day-to-day?
- Which risk categories are being quoted most frequently?
- Where are quotes being declined, and at what premium levels?
- Are pricing decisions consistent across the team?
With a spreadsheet-based workflow, these questions are essentially unanswerable because it’s locked inside hundreds of individual files with no way to query across them.
Learn how EASA addresses the core limitations of Excel-based tools: Learn More
How EASA’s Database Functionality Works
When you deploy a rating spreadsheet through EASA, every session becomes a record. Here’s what happens:
1. Your spreadsheet runs on a secure server.
The actuary’s model stays centralized. Users access tools through a secure browser, where agents, underwriters, and internal teams use a web-based interface to complete tasks without working directly in Excel. They see a clean, controlled interface where they enter inputs and receive outputs.
2. Every submission is automatically saved to a relational database.
When a user saves an instance, the data is automatically recorded within a central database for full reporting functionality, allowing you to conduct filtered searches, perform data analytics, and integrate with dashboarding software. This is built into the platform, so all user inputs and results are stored in a centralized, relational database with full audit history.
3. You can connect to your own external database.
EASA supports a two-way sync with your database, so underwriters don’t waste time searching for data. If your organization already uses Salesforce, Oracle, MySQL, or Microsoft Dynamics, EASA can read from and write to those systems directly, putting rating data exactly where the rest of your business data lives.
See EASA’s database functionality in action: Watch Now
What Analytics Actually Become Possible
For MGAs evaluating LLM-based pre-fill, there are several capabilities that separate a well-designed solution from one that creates new problems. This is where the shift from flat files to a structured database becomes most valuable. With every quote captured in a consistent, queryable format, your team can start asking and answering questions that were simply out of reach before.
Pricing consistency across underwriters. With flat Excel files, there’s no easy way to compare how different underwriters are pricing the same risk. With a central database, you can run queries across every submission and surface discrepancies in how the rater is being applied. If one region is consistently pricing a particular risk class lower than others, that shows up in the data.
Quote volume and conversion trends. You can monitor how underwriters interact with your rater to identify trends and improve your rating process over time. Which product lines are generating the most activity? Where are quotes being abandoned without a bind? Which risk profiles are producing the highest decline rates? These patterns are invisible in a spreadsheet-based world, but straightforward to surface when submissions are stored in a structured database.
Input pattern analysis. Because EASA stores not just the outputs but the full set of inputs for every session, you can store user activity and all users’ inputs and outputs for data integrity and auditing. This means you can analyze which combinations of risk factors are driving premium outcomes, identify where underwriters are overriding default values, and spot cases where the model may be producing unexpected results for certain input combinations.
Performance tracking over time. Because every instance of your pricing spreadsheet saved by each user is stored in a secure database, you can track your CPQ performance against goals using analytics as well as audit any sales and quoting activity. Connecting this data to your bind and loss data downstream allows you to start validating whether your rating model is performing as intended across different segments.
Integration with dashboarding tools. The database doesn’t have to be a closed system. EASA supports integration with dashboarding software, meaning your rating data can flow directly into tools like Power BI or Tableau for visualization. Rather than asking someone to manually compile a reporting spreadsheet at the end of each month, your leadership team can have live dashboards that reflect every quote being run in real time.
Audit and compliance reporting. EASA provides version control, access restrictions, and an audit trail of all changes and submissions, ensuring your pricing and underwriting tools follow internal and external compliance standards. When a regulator or internal audit team asks how a specific risk was priced, the answer is retrievable immediately rather than dependent on someone finding the right file version on their hard drive.
The Zurich Example
Zurich Insurance used EASA to solve exactly this problem at scale. They needed a way to securely distribute spreadsheets used for product pricing, where data and formulas are frequently updated. Sharing these spreadsheets came with typical issues including poor access control, version confusion, lack of a central repository for users’ data, error introduction and proliferation, and poorly protected intellectual property.
EASA gave them a path forward without requiring them to rewrite their models from scratch. The custom web applications which replaced raw spreadsheets were so intuitive that end-user training was no longer required, and end-users could only access the correct certified version of a spreadsheet, ensuring consistent pricing for customers.
Read the full customer success story: Read More
What This Means for Your Team
Moving to centralized data changes what’s possible across your entire organization. Actuaries gain visibility into how their models are being used in the field. Underwriters work from a single, always-current version of the rater with no risk of running an outdated model. Business leaders can ask data-driven questions about pricing performance, volume trends, and risk distribution and get real answers. IT and compliance teams have a clean audit trail and centralized data governance without having to chase down scattered file versions.
Getting Started
EASA’s database functionality provides a low-cost mechanism to capture data and enable comprehensive analytics and reporting, while ensuring the complete protection of your critical IP and the integrity of your calculations. Your spreadsheet keeps doing what it does best, and EASA handles secure access, version control, automatic data capture, and the analytics layer your rating tools were never able to provide on their own.
If your team is running quotes every day with no structured record of them, the data is already being generated. EASA makes sure you can use it.
Want to see how EASA’s database and analytics capabilities could work for your rating tools? Request a demo or explore the insurance solutions page.