How First West Insurance tackled growth and hiring challenges with agency bill automation

First West Insurance is a locally owned, independent insurance agency based in Bozeman, Montana. Serving individuals, families, and businesses throughout the Gallatin Valley and across all 50 states, First West Insurance combines deep community roots with an extensive network of over 100 insurance carriers to deliver tailored coverage solutions across personal, commercial, and group benefit lines.

Like many growing organizations, First West Insurance relied heavily on manual processes in the Accounting department. When Brianne Downey joined as CFO two years ago, she had two main objectives:

• Future proof First West Insurance’s operations to handle the incredible growth it was experiencing
• Embrace technology to help maximize the efficiency of the team they had today

Brianne inherited a carrier payment process that was almost entirely manual. Previously using Applied Pay and IPFS, her team was touching the same invoice multiple times before it was resolved, and paying carriers consumed two full days every week. On top of that, the current labor market made it difficult to hire in-office accounting staff to keep up with the workload. To maintain visibility into collections, Brianne personally sent a weekly summary of outstanding invoices each Friday, prompting account managers to engage with clients and address overdue balances.

First West Insurance’s team knew they had to look to technology to help alleviate these challenges - but they wanted a solution that not only would address the current problems with their existing vendors but also a partner that would truly help the team transition to ease the natural hesitation that comes with new software and new processes.

Ascend was chosen due to its unique comprehensive and consolidated approach to making the end-to-end process from billing to payables as seamless as possible within one single platform and process.

Ascend was rolled out methodically, one carrier at a time, so the team could fully understand the new process before adding the next. The entire team, from accounting to account managers, sat with Ascend’s team, both in-person and online, to understand how to best utilize the platform for each of their team members.

Since implementing Ascend, First West Insurance has eliminated the two days a week its team used to spend manually paying carriers. This time saved was spent on proactive work that had never fit into the schedule before, like running self-audits and staying ahead of Applied Epic system updates.

Cash management also improved. The team also strengthened its cash management practices by reducing the time required to process and deposit commissions. This improvement enhanced the company's cash cycle, increased the availability of investable cash, and increased the speed of paying and reconciling carriers.

Account managers also have embraced Ascend because not only have they seen more competitive rates than IPFS, delivering savings directly to clients, but they’ve been able to get ahead of open invoices by proactively tracking and following up on open invoices so accounting no longer has to remind them on a weekly basis.