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Christine Frank joined Highstreet Insurance Partners, a top 25 broker and one of the fastest-growing agencies in the country, as the Director of Central Agency Accounting after decades of working in the industry.
Frank soon discovered that Highstreet's rapid expansion, built on an aggressive acquisition strategy, presented a significant challenge for the accounting team: their direct bill reconciliation volume was growing faster than any existing process could handle.
To keep pace, Highstreet enlisted the help of a large offshore team, largely focused on processing direct bill revenue.
Frank quickly recognized the inefficiencies of the offshore approach. Manually training and retraining offshore users was expensive and time-consuming, and the coordination overhead was becoming a bottleneck. Each new acquisition brought more complexity, creating a growing backlog of errors and exceptions. Frank could see the trajectory clearly.
"We didn't want to hire 20 additional people just to do direct bill–we knew that wouldn't scale," she explained.
Frank's search for a solution led Highstreet to Comulate. With decades of experience in agency accounting, Frank had seen plenty of automation promises fall short. Accounting Manager Sarah Nickels shared that skepticism.
"I'd seen automation fail at large agencies before," Nickels admits. "Demo data always looks perfect. Real statements with real complexity are typically where automation falls apart."
But when Frank and Nickels decided to test Comulate with Highstreet's most challenging data, the skepticism evaporated. "I genuinely thought it was too good to be true until I watched it handle our messiest statements flawlessly,” said Nickels.
Frank and the Highstreet team moved decisively, adopting Comulate to automate the direct bill processing work that had previously required multiple offshore resources to complete. The transformation was immediate.
"My entire perspective on what was possible changed within the first use of Comulate,” says Nickels. “I was able to process direct bill revenue for an entire agency in two days–rather than in a month. This was what I’d always wanted but never thought anyone could actually build."
With month-long processes now taking just days, Frank realized the math had changed entirely. “We went from managing a problem, to having no problem at all,” Frank explains. So Frank and the Highstreet team eliminated the offshore resources and brought all direct bill work in-house to be managed by one person. That person was Amel Sefer, who had joined Highstreet just as the transition was beginning.
As Highstreet's acquisition pace accelerated, so did the volume of direct bill revenue for Amel to process. Rather than hitting a capacity wall, Amel absorbed each new agency seamlessly, processing multiples more revenue than the offshore team ever handled, without requiring additional support.
From coordination headaches to simple handoffs
Frank's centralized accounting team wasn't the only group that benefited from Highstreet's newfound efficiency. For acquired agencies, instead of coordinating direct bill with an offshore team, the new agencies simply handed off their direct bill work to the centralized accounting team and moved on.
This streamlined approach became an engine to accelerate Highstreet's aggressive acquisition strategy. Converting approximately four agencies per month, Frank had eliminated one of the major accounting integration bottlenecks that typically slow growth, allowing Highstreet to scale without added operational complexity.
With their direct bill transformation proven at scale, Frank expanded Highstreet’s accounting strategy to leverage purpose-built automation across additional accounting workflows.
For Frank, the partnership had evolved far beyond software implementation, becoming the operational backbone that enabled a highly efficient internal team and streamlined integration for new acquisitions. This operational transformation led Frank to establish a long-term strategic partnership, positioning Comulate as Highstreet's core accounting engine for future growth.
“Comulate has become our core accounting infrastructure," Frank declares. "They don't just solve our current challenges—they anticipate what we'll need next, and deliver it. We've seen where this leads, and now that we’ve experienced it, there's no going back.”
