Out-of-sequence jobs

Many policy jobs have effective dates later than the effective date of any existing bound revisions for that contractual period. The change implicitly applies from the job’s effective date until the end of the contractual policy period. For example, increasing coverage on an effective date applies for the rest of the contractual period, or canceling a policy is effective for the rest of the policy period.

However, if a change is bound to take effect before a previous change (that is, earlier in effective time), there are additional implications for completing this change. Depending on what changes already happened to the policy, sometimes PolicyCenter requests that you review how to apply changes for the rest of the contractual policy period.

For example, suppose the following standard order of changes:

On January 1, the customer adds new auto policy effective all year for a red car, covered for $10,000. The effective date of this change is January 1.
On March 1, customer increases a specific coverage on the car to $20,000, effective from that day to year end. The effective date of this change is February 1.
On March 2, the customer calls to say that the original car was painted blue on February 1. The effective date of this change is March 1. This effective date is later than the effective date of the previous change.

This is a regular change because effective dates of the changes are later than effective dates of previous changes.

However, if you reverse the last two effective dates, the order or changes would be:

On January 1, the customer adds new auto policy effective all year for a red car, covered for $10,000. The effective date of the change is January 1.
On March 1, the customer increases a specific coverage on the car to $20,000, effective from that day to year end. The effective date of the change is March 1.
On March 2, the customer calls to say that the original car was painted blue on February 1. The effective date of the change is February 1. This effective date is earlier than the effective date of the previous change.

The last change in that example is an out-of-sequence change because February 1 is earlier than March 1. For effective time after February 1, there are two date ranges:

From February 1 to February 28 in effective time, the PolicyPeriod must represent the newly painted blue car with the original coverage.
From March 1 to year end in effective time, the PolicyPeriod must represent the updated increased coverage. However, PolicyCenter considered this a red car for this time range before the latest change. Was the car blue for the rest of the year or did it change only from February 1 to March 1?

Any change with effective date ordering like this is called an out-of-sequence job. Any PolicyCenter job, such as cancellation and reinstatement, not just policy change jobs can be out of sequence. A job is out of sequence if its effective date is earlier than other jobs bound on the policy for that contractual period.

PolicyCenter automatically detects out of sequence jobs. Some changes may not need user intervention. In other cases, you must review out-of-sequence conflicts in the Policy Review > Out-of-Sequence Conflicts tab before binding the job.