It has now been 15 years since Compulife added a Forms Library to our software. As it has from the beginning, the Compulife Forms Library is a FREE service for Compulife PC subscribers.

Forms have been free because it has NEVER made sense to us that any life insurance agent or agency should have to pay for life insurance company forms. When I was first began to sell life insurance in Canada in 1979 there were no PC computers, no internet and no electronic forms. All application and service forms were pre-printed by life insurance companies and given FREE to agents. Today, even if you get PDF forms for free, they end up being printed by YOU at your expense. On top of that, many third part forms providers charge agencies for the privilege of accessing those forms. Somehow high tech has taken us from something that you used to get for free and has replaced it with something you have to pay for. I continue to find this bewildering. With electronic forms life insurance companies should be saving money. After all, companies no longer have to pay for printing and shipping of forms to agents. And when a form is changed/updated, there is no longer any waste with old forms being tossed aside.

As background, unlike the rates which Compulife obtains and uses to quote insurance premiums, forms are protected by copyright. Compulife can and will ONLY offer forms from life insurance companies who have given us permission to provide their forms. Apart from needing that permission, the ONLY condition that Compulife makes to a life company, in order to include their forms in our library, is that the company will routinely advise us of changes to their forms, such as new forms to be added and out-of-date forms to be removed. We need to know what states forms are used in. Further, we try to work with companies to create the product categories into which their forms are listed in our software.

IMPORTANT:   There is NO CHARGE to a life company for our forms service and there is NO CHARGE to our customers for this service.

The ONLY exception is that if our subscriber choose the web option of providing forms. Agency subscribers who have our webquote option can add a forms engine to their websites for $84 per year. This gives the agency's website (can't imagine an agent needing this) a way to provide forms to their agents at no cost to those agents. The $84 per year is a token amount to cover the costs of server bandwidth and software maintenance (some forms are HUGE). Once again, you are NOT paying for the forms themselves.

Our forms technology maintains a database of forms that use transparent text files that are easy to understand. Our forms database files can easily be converted into spreadsheets. A life insurance company does not have to use our technology to see how we are presenting their forms to our subscribers.

We have INVITED and OFFERED our technology (for free) to life insurance companies. While the software we use to maintain the text files is compiled C++ code, the data files are such that if Compulife no longer provided the compiled software to the companies, it would be easy to write new software that talks to the old data files (text files).

Alternatively, it would be easy to maintain the files by using a spreadsheet program. We have companies who from time to time ask us for a copy of our data in a spreadsheet and that is easy to provide. Providing a company maintains the format, they can make changes to that spreadsheet and we can re-integrate that back into our database. Therefore, if for some reason we were no longer able to maintain our database, the data files are so "open source" in nature that it would be easy for a life insurance company to continue to maintain it themselves.

Over the years the biggest challenge that we have had is keeping the forms updated. Every company seems to have their own system for storing and retrieving forms, and they have their own ways of notifying 3rd parties like Compulife of changes to their forms. Sometimes we are in the loop for information, then a change in staff at the H/O leaves us out of the loop. When that happens it is the Compulife subscriber who gets an out-of-date form from Compulife, who then notifies us and complains about it. The will trigger us reaching out to the company to find out what happened.

Given that we make no money on the forms library, and yet do a LOT OF WORK to keep it up to date, the question is "How many subscribers are using our Forms Library?" Obviously if no one is using it, it would be bad business for us to keep maintaining it. Once again, it is an expense to Compulife and generates no direct profit.

So the question we have for you is "Are you using the Compulife Forms Library? If you are using it, please let us know. We would like to know how many are using forms through Compulife. If you are NOT using the Forms Library, why not? Is there something we can do to make it better? How do you access forms alternatively?

Your feedback would be VERY helpful. Email us at service@compulife.com and tell us about it.