The appetite guide

Updated July 11, 2026

The Preferred markets by class section of the Vault, tagged with an Appetite pill, is your agency's appetite guide: which markets you place which classes with, who to contact, and any notes worth remembering the next time that class comes across your desk.

#The columns

The appetite table has four columns, exactly as headed in the app:

  • Class. The line of business or risk type, for example "Lessors risk (LRO)," "Self storage," or "Contractors GL."
  • Market. The carrier or MGA you place that class with.
  • Contact. Your person at that market.
  • Notes. Anything else worth keeping, from an email address to a flat "we do not write this in house."

A class can have more than one market. It is common to see the same class appear on multiple rows, each pointing at a different market with its own contact and notes, so you have options in front of you rather than a single default.

In the demo vault shipped with Summit Commercial Insurance, the table includes rows like Lessors risk (LRO) placed with Caprock Specialty, Self storage placed with Frontier E&S, and Contractors GL placed with Brazos MGA. Those are fictional demo markets, useful for seeing the shape of the table, not real carrier relationships.

#The market check during a build

When you build a priced proposal from a parsed carrier quote, ProClose checks the carrier it extracted against your appetite guide. That check surfaces in the options step, the "Your vault weighed in. Anything else?" screen you land on right before the deck is built. Three things can happen:

  • The carrier matches a market on your appetite guide. You see a confirmation that the market is on file for that class, along with the contact and when the guide was last updated.
  • The carrier does not match anything on file. You see a note that this carrier is not in your vault yet, worth a look at once you bind it, alongside a count of the other markets you do have on file.
  • No carrier was parsed at all (a discovery brief, or a proposal built without a quote). You see a neutral note that your vault is ready to consult, with your total market and class counts.

This is the practical payoff of keeping the appetite guide current: the next time a quote comes in for a market you already know, the build tells you so, right there in the options step, without you having to go check the Vault by hand. See The pre-build options step for the rest of what that screen shows, and How the Vault shapes every proposal for the other touchpoints.

#Before a quote exists: the market shortlist

The options step above only runs once a carrier has already been parsed off a quote. Earlier than that, the moment a call is analyzed, if its business type matches a class here, ProClose builds a ranked shortlist of which of your own markets to take the risk to, aware of which ones are actually appointed in the state the risk is in rather than the state your agency sits in. See The market shortlist for the full picture.