How we helped an insurance firm add an estimated $5.1M a year in adjusted EBITDA.

They wanted new programs to grow profit without growing the reporting backlog.

The firm was a managing general agent (MGA) that grew by bringing in specialist underwriting teams to run insurance programs. Those teams wrote business under authority granted by insurance carriers, while a shared-services team handled much of the reporting that kept those relationships working.

Every carrier required a monthly list of policies and claims, called a bordereau, in its own format. But the information came from different policy systems, pricing tools, and claims files, with no shared way to connect all the records belonging to the same policy. Staff rebuilt those connections by hand for each carrier and program, then repeated the work the next month.

The firm wanted growth to produce more profit, but every new program added work to the same shared-services team. New underwriting teams also waited for reporting to be ready before they could begin writing business, so the firm was carrying their costs before they could earn. They came to us asking for faster, automated carrier report packs.

The slow reports were also delaying the business behind them.

We compared a two-week staff time study with system logs, reviewed carrier submissions, and traced the work involved in launching earlier programs. Monthly reporting took a median of 27 staff-hours for each carrier-program relationship, and the firm took a median of 11 months from signing a new team to reaching a clean monthly close.

What we found was that each launch repeated the same mapping work: deciding which field in one system matched which field in another, then proving the carrier's report was correct. Those delays mattered because a carrier needed an acceptable test report before releasing authority for a new program to write business. The firm was paying a signed team's costs while that team waited.

A faster report pack still needed dependable records underneath it. And so we recommended connecting the policy, premium, and claims records once, then using them to produce each carrier's required format.

We gave the team a way to reuse its work across reports and new programs.

We gave each policy a shared identifier and connected its transactions and claims to it. We also worked through the reporting lead's mapping rules and wrote them into a library the team could maintain, so those decisions no longer depended on one person's memory.

We made each carrier's template a saved configuration, so the team could produce the next month's report from the same approved rules. When a new source or template arrived, AI proposed how its fields matched the shared record and showed the evidence, leaving the reporting team to approve the mapping instead of starting from an empty workbook.

The system also checked premiums and claims against the source totals and sent unexplained differences to the team before a report could be signed. That gave staff a way to focus on the items that needed attention while keeping control of the numbers sent to carriers.

We built this inside the firm's own cloud environment. Reporting staff kept control of submissions, and underwriters kept control of pricing and risk decisions. The firm also requested a more frequent claims feed from its administrator, because faster reconciliation could only produce a current report if the incoming claims data was current too.

The team needed proof on its own reports before retiring the spreadsheets.

We tested the new process against a preserved history of reports the carriers had already accepted. That comparison exposed errors in some of the old reports, which the firm corrected with its carriers. Matching an old file wasn't enough if the old file was wrong.

After the pilot, we helped the team move more carrier-program relationships onto the shared record. Each relationship had to produce two consecutive accepted monthly submissions before its old reporting path was retired.

Two report owners kept building their spreadsheets alongside the new process because they hadn't yet seen enough evidence on their own reports. Their reporting lead walked through those reports with them, item by item, so they could see how the numbers reconciled and stop duplicating the work.

A claims-code change exposed a safeguard we needed to add.

During rollout, the claims administrator changed its status codes, and our mapping treated affected claims as closed with no reserves. A report owner's review and our automated comparison caught the error before the draft reached a carrier.

We told the client that morning, corrected the mapping and reran the report that afternoon, and added checks to stop processing when unfamiliar codes appeared. We extended those checks across the sources at no charge, so a new code would stop for attention before it could produce another wrong report. Human sign-off and reconciliation stayed in place to catch errors those checks couldn't detect.

They gained reporting capacity and brought new programs through onboarding almost eight months sooner.

With approved mappings available for reuse, the team could spend less time rebuilding reports and more time bringing new programs into operation. At follow-up, median monthly reporting work had fallen from 27 to 6 staff-hours per carrier-program relationship. That's 21 staff-hours freed each month at the median, the equivalent of more than two and a half eight-hour workdays for one reporting relationship.

New programs also reached a clean monthly close almost eight months sooner at the median. The earlier six launches had taken 11 months from signing, while three later launches took 3.1 months using the same definition of a clean close. The team now had a repeatable way to get a new program reporting correctly, instead of rebuilding that process for every launch.

The CFO attributed an estimated $5.1M a year in adjusted EBITDA, the firm's adjusted measure of operating earnings, to our work compared with its forecast without the change. Faster starts reduced the months new teams spent making a loss, and the reporting capacity let the firm remove planned hires from its budget. Better data also supported earlier carrier approvals to write more business and helped resolve financial disputes.

The largest part was modeled from the CFO's program launch forecasts. Earlier carrier approvals also brought income forward, so that benefit wasn't assumed to continue indefinitely. The estimate describes the annual contribution at the follow-up. It isn't cash collected over a completed year.

The company still fell short of its broader profit goal, but the reporting team could now support more growth. The next limit was bringing in enough new underwriting teams and getting them to profitable scale.

For a closer look at the reporting process.

The technical companion explains the shared record, mapping approvals, report checks, and how the team could add new sources. It also defines the reporting, onboarding, and financial measures.

Their team could keep adding programs without bringing us back to rebuild the process.

New programs and carrier requirements would keep arriving, so we taught the team how to extend the process as well as run it. We gave them tools for adding sources and templates, written operating instructions, and an onboarding kit, then tested the handover by having their reporting lead and analysts add a new template and source without us in the room and run the checks themselves.

Their team subsequently onboarded a new program using the kit and continued adding sources and templates on their own. They could support the next launch without asking us to rebuild its reporting, while their technology team kept control of the pipelines.

The original request was for faster reports. Connecting the records behind those reports also removed work that had delayed new programs, while leaving the firm's next growth constraint visible.

If you’re trying to grow your own business, start with your goal, look at what it'll take to achieve it, and then identify what's keeping you from taking action. Just remember that every business is different and that repeatedly rebuilding carrier reporting was just their bottleneck and it might not be yours.