To decrease manual accounting costs and increase revenue, Comulate has introduced revenue automation and intelligence software for large insurance brokers and agencies. The platform automates time-consuming direct bill processes, eliminating manual work performed by broker accounting teams by up to 90%. The software also drives revenue integrity by automatically identifying missing commissions and delivers actionable revenue intelligence through real-time forecasting, variance tracking and more.
“Broker CFOs and COOs consistently tell us they’re losing several percentage points of revenue between labor-intensive accounting processes and missing commissions, especially within employee benefits,” says Jordan Katz, Comulate co-founder and CEO.
The Comulate team worked very closely with its initial clients — multiple top 50 brokers — whose input was used to enhance the platform. During this soft launch phase, the vision for the platform expanded beyond automating processes to transforming end-to-end revenue operations.
“Finance leaders repeatedly said they couldn’t accurately forecast or track variance,” Katz says. “Meanwhile, producers often said they lacked visibility to understand how and for what they’re being paid, reducing trust and distracting them from selling and driving top-line growth.
“On many levels, these revenue challenges spider-crack throughout an agency, requiring production and service teams to participate in the revenue process. Our incredible broker partners have directly framed our mission to deliver world-class revenue tools for broker finance teams.”
Comulate integrates directly to major AMS, CRM and ERP software, enabling automatic reconciliation of disparate carrier and broker data and effortless posting of reconciled transactions to an agency’s ledger, an experience mirroring that of the most streamlined direct bill commission downloads. The platform also automatically improves AMS data quality by enabling accounting teams to automatically update policy data based on policy information present on a carrier statement.
Even acquisitive brokers with unconsolidated agencies using isolated agency management systems can achieve revenue workflow centralization and unified real-time reporting. “Comulate can connect to multiple agency management systems and create a uniform revenue automation and intelligence layer by auto-routing revenue and driving visibility of revenue in real time,” explains Katz.
Broker experiences
“The value Comulate has brought to our firm is beyond any software I’ve seen on the market,” says Kamini Patel, director of business operations at Cobbs Allen/CAC, a top 30 U.S. brokerage firm. “We receive carrier statements as PDFs and spreadsheets. In the past, it could take hours to fully process some of them. Now we upload all of those directly to Comulate, and within seconds, the software extracts and auto-reconciles commissions to policies and then posts to Applied Epic.”
According to Patel, the brokerage has already reduced manual direct bill work by over 85%, and this continues to tick up each month. “Comulate has actually solved what everyone said there was no hope of solving,” she says. “We went from planning to hire more dedicated people for this role to significantly reducing the time it was taking our already-stretched-thin team. Comulate changed the equation.”
Also leveraging Comulate to automate its end-to-end direct bill workflow and manage revenue integrity is M3 Insurance, Wisconsin’s largest insurance agency. Although the firm had already achieved a higher degree of efficiency using Excel workbooks, it was still limited by error-prone importers. Yet, Comulate was adopted for more than its efficiency and bottom-line impact. “I want our team to feel rewarded and challenged, as well as to be prepared for future roles,” says Brian Donarski, M3’s VP of finance and accounting.
“Before Comulate, there were two main blockers to our revenue team’s personal growth: the technology they were using and the constant data preparation and entry they had to do. Now with the dramatic time savings we’ve unlocked, our team can spend time on revenue integrity and actioning on variance. That not only gives them a more engaging and fulfilling role, it’s also substantially more value accretive for M3.”
About Comulate
San Francisco-based Comulate’s mission is to build world-class software for finance and accounting teams in the insurance industry. The software integrates with major AMS, CRM and ERP systems and powers the revenue process for some of the largest brokers and agencies in the U.S. comulate.com