Deferred Acquisition Costs Workout
- 03:02
Understand how deferred acquisition costs (DAC) are calculated and modeled
Transcript
In this workout, we are being asked to model out the deferred acquisition cost account which is an asset. And this represents typically commissions that have been paid to third parties to be able to arrange the initial insurance policy. So let's first just start by forecasting written premiums. These are the written premiums that we're forecasting, assuming they're growing by 4% a year. Now, we are gonna make the assumption that of the written premiums, 54.2% of those premiums we wrote in the current year are going to be earned and the commissions as a percentage of the written premiums are 13.6. So, firstly, we'll calculate the cash commissions by taking the 13.6 assumption multiplied by the written premiums. Now those are the cash commissions and we're going to calculate the amount of those cash commissions that we have paid in the current year are going to be expensed. And it would seem reasonable that if 54.2% of the written premiums are earned then 54.2% of the cash commissions paid in the year are going to be expensed. So in this case, we will take the percentage of earned premiums multiplied by the cash commissions and we'll assume that we'll expense 7.7 of new commissions. Let me copy this across next. Now on the balance sheet we've got a deferred acquisition cost account and last year we had a balance of 6.2. So you can see that the ending balance of the deferred acquisition cost in the historical year is calculated by taking written premiums in the historical year multiplied by the commission rate of 13.6 and then multiplied by one minus the earned premiums. Because obviously, we don't want the deferred acquisition cost to include costs that have been expensed. We want the costs that haven't been expensed in the asset account on the balance sheet. At the beginning of year one, we will see the deferred acquisition costs equal to the ending balance of the prior year. And then what we'll do is we will take the commissions that have been paid but not expensed yet. So what I'm gonna do is I'll take the 14.1 and I'll subtract the commissions that actually were expensed Now, because the year's gone forward we will see the 6.2 that we started as DAC going to be expensed in the current year because we'll assume that this is property and casualty and that we'll just spread over the acquisition costs over a 12 month period. So this means the ending amount of DAC is going to be equal to the 6.5 and I'll just copy that right. So, this is just how we can model deferred acquisition cost based on our cash commissions that we're paying to third parties less what we have expensed to give us the ending balance of the deferred acquisition cost. And that will sit on the balance sheet on the asset side.