Bordereau

In reinsurance, an insurer that cedes risk may send a reinsurer a schedule of policies covered, premiums due, or losses incurred. This is more detailed than a top-line summary, and the reinsurer can use it to check what risk it accepted and what financial amount is attributable to that risk.

A premium bordereau may record policy identifiers, coverage dates, insured amounts, currencies, and premium amounts. A claims or loss bordereau may list claims, dates, paid amounts, outstanding estimates, and changes since the last report.

The agreement and reporting standard determine which fields are mandatory. The document's usefulness depends on consistency, because if policy IDs change between submissions, a reinsurer may double-count an exposure or miss an adjustment.

Matching reporting periods and currencies prevents an apparent premium difference from being mistaken for a genuine coverage discrepancy. A bordereau is a data transfer, not the underlying insurance contract itself: the contract sets the risks and obligations, and the schedule reports transactions under it.

An omitted or mistaken line can require correction without necessarily changing the legal coverage, subject to the agreement's terms. Lloyd's Coverholder Reporting Standards discuss risk bordereaux and the separate reporting of premium and claims information.

The guide notes that some information may be supplied once and reused rather than duplicated in each submission, but specific agreements still govern required fields. Timeliness matters for both parties, since late loss reporting can leave the reinsurer's reserve estimate or cash planning behind events, while late premium records can delay reconciliation.

A reporting calendar, ownership of each field, and a clear correction process make the schedule operationally useful. Managers should separate new records from revisions: a claim opened last month and paid this month may appear in multiple files, but should not be counted as two claims.

Stable IDs, valuation dates, and transaction types let analysts distinguish opening, payment, reserve change, and closure. Privacy and access controls matter because the schedule can contain policyholder or claimant details, so send only fields necessary under the contract and governing reporting rules, and use agreed secure channels.

An insurer should not assume that any internal spreadsheet is ready to forward merely because it has the right financial totals. For a non-insurance manager, think of a bordereau as the detailed supporting register behind a shared-risk invoice or loss statement, and ask who prepares it, who receives it, what the agreement requires, and how corrections propagate; the French-derived label is less important than complete, consistent data.