Setting Up E&O Category Tracking
BaseBuilders can organize your project data by insurance category, so your annual E&O renewal report is a few minutes of work instead of a multi-day reconstruction. This is built on custom fields, which let your firm track project details specific to your workflow.
If you're not familiar with custom fields, see this article first — it covers field types and how they work generally. This article covers the E&O-specific setup on top of that.
(For the full picture on what underwriters actually ask for at renewal, see our complete guide. For a deeper look at handling tricky categorization cases — mixed-use projects, renovation vs. new construction, and similar edge cases — see this guide.)
This is a one-time setup. Once it's in place, running the report each renewal cycle is quick — covered in the companion article on running the E&O report.
Step 1: Create the E&O Category custom field
In project settings, create a new custom field named E&O Category (or whatever label makes sense to your team). Set the field type to Select — a dropdown list — since consistency matters here: everyone choosing from the same list is what makes the category summary reportable later.
Step 2: Load your underwriter's category list
Every underwriter uses their own category list — there's no industry standard. Pull the list directly from your carrier's renewal application, or ask your broker for it if you don't have a copy on hand.
Load each category from that list as an option in the Select field. Include categories your firm doesn't currently do work in — a category that shows zero is more useful to the underwriter than one that's simply missing.
If your firm has landed on rules for handling edge cases (a mixed-use project split by square footage, for example), it's worth documenting those rules somewhere your project managers can reference them at intake, so the categorization stays consistent over time.
Step 3: Tag your existing projects
For projects already active in BaseBuilders, go through and assign the appropriate E&O Category to each one. You typically only need to cover the reporting periods your underwriter asks for — usually the current and prior two years — rather than your full project history.
Going forward
Once the field exists and the retroactive pass is done, new projects get tagged at intake — a project manager sets the E&O Category at the same time as other project setup fields. Takes seconds, and it means nobody has to reconstruct this from memory at renewal time again.
Note: the E&O Category field lives on the project record. When you run the renewal report, you can pull this category into Projects, Invoices, or Income views — the category flows through from the project even though it was only entered once. Which module to run the report from is its own decision, covered in the next article.
Your specific category list and how to handle edge cases in your portfolio are conversations for your broker or underwriter — BaseBuilders organizes your project data, but the category definitions themselves come from your carrier.