Life Insurance Quoting Software development is challenging because of two main reasons. First, most life insurance quoting calculations are difficult and depend on many factors. Incorporating many factors and tying them to various databases can be a daunting task for a developer. The second reason is how User Interface rules a structured for specific cases. For example, there is no reason to ask a user smoking related questions like how long they have been smoking or how many cigarettes, if the person is not a smoker. This can be also true for various other illnesses or conditions.
Keep Life Insurance Quoting Calculations in Excel
Life insurance quoting logic is typically developed by actuaries. They analyze available data on mortality and factors affecting it. They then build algorithms that best estimate a person’s mortality rate based on various health factors and tie them to the pricing of their life insurance products. Not surprisingly, actuaries love building these types of algorithms in Excel. It is then the responsibility of a developer to program that logic into the life insurance quoting software. The good news is that SpreadsheetWeb eliminates this last step by executing the entire quoting logic built in Excel as is as, and can transform it into an application.
Design Life Insurance Quoting Software User Interface in SpreadsheetWeb
In addition to executing the quoting logic, SpreadsheetWeb also allows building the entire user interface of a Life Insurance Quoting Software in a web-based drag-and-drop interface, eliminating the need to code. Let’s see how. The screenshot below shows SpreadsheetWeb’s User Interface Designer page for a Life Insurance Quoting Software. This application consists of 19 pages that are listed under the Pages and User Interface modules.
Each page contains a number of questions. The first page of the application has several basic questions, all of which are required to continue to the next page.
The application is configured to allow navigation between pages using Next and Back buttons. The next page contains some basic health questions. These questions are important because subsequent pages are only enabled when user answers match certain criteria.
For example, if the user answers “Yes” to the question “Have you ever used any tobacco products?”, the next page will contain smoking related questions. Otherwise, those questions will be skipped.
This allows each user to see only relevant questions and simplifies the overall application flow. Let’s see how to make specific pages and questions visible, depending on user’s answers to other questions. Let’s take the tobacco related questions. For this, we go back to the Designer interface and look at the properties of the page that contains the all tobacco questions shown above.
The name of this page in the system is HEALTH1. The visibility of this page is controlled by a value named “Boolean7”. This value is a cell in the underlying Excel file that contains all Life Insurance Quoting calculations. The cell corresponding to the named range “Boolean7” contains a simple IF formula that returns a TRUE or FALSE value. If the cell “Question3” returns “Yes”, the formula returns TRUE, and a TRUE result makes the page HEALTH1 visible in the application. The value of the cell “Question3” is coming from the question “Have you ever used any tobacco products?” on the previous page.
The idea of tying the visibility of each page to Excel makes it possible to build any type of logic, as long as you can write the formula in Excel.
Other Features like Database Integration and Document Generation
You can enhance your Life Insurance Quoting Software with various other features supported in SpreadsheetWeb. Capturing the data submitted by each user can be achieved by enabling Database features. Again, it doesn’t require to be a database expert to do this. Within a few minutes, you can add database support to your application. See the instructional video on this feature. Creating a sales quote is another desirable feature in Life Insurance Quoting Software. But a typical quote document would contain various static and dynamic content, as well as other features like headers, footers, or cover pages. Creating these types of documents can be challenging in most projects. SpreadsheetWeb also simplifies this process by allowing you to design your document in Microsoft Word, and tie it to your application through inserting stubs into the documents. This instructional video explains how to add document generation to your Life Insurance Quoting Software.
Life Insurance Quoting Software Demo
Finally, here is the link to this application, built entirely on the SpreadsheetWeb platform. Simply navigate through the pages by pressing the Next and Back buttons. At the end of the application, it calculates the rates for several fictitious life insurance products based on desired coverage and policy terms.
