Revenue integrity was a subject Brian Donarski, VP of Finance and Accounting at M3 Insurance (M3), was talking about before he even received the job offer. “During the interview process, I learned about the team’s challenges surrounding revenue: a lack of confidence that carriers were paying us accurately, low transparency with producers, and a disconnect with the service team,” he says. Upon joining the company, it became his priority to improve M3’s revenue integrity processes from end-to-end.
Kate Gabriel works on a team of revenue analysts within M3's finance team. She analyzes revenue for correctness, tracks down missing revenue, and identifies trends. She processes direct bill revenue from carrier statements and ensures that producers are being paid correctly, ensuring that tens of millions of dollars are properly received and recorded each year. “If revenue is not recorded and reconciled properly and on time, our people don’t get paid accurately, our company growth and decision making is negatively affected,” she explains.
But for a while, Gabriel was using fragile systems to manage her work. Instead of proactively finding problems or recovering revenue, she was stuck keying in data, thus relegating her to a processing role. “As a result, the revenue function at M3 lacked the resilience we needed it to have, and we would have struggled from an employee’s absence due to illness or if they had quit,” says Donarski.
Gabriel and her colleagues processing direct bill revenues spent hours manually entering data and preparing spreadsheets to be supported by Epic’s direct bill importer. Commission statements would arrive in the snail mail, or be downloaded as PDFs or Excel before being manually entered. The entire process could take one hour up to a full day to process a large statement. Despite the team’s extensive attempts to leverage Excel workbook templates and custom macros to automate certain data prep for large carriers to work with the Applied Epic importer, it could still take hours per statement on average.
This sluggish process didn’t just impact the finance department—it reached into sales and leadership, too. “Finance is an extension of the sales team,” explains Donarski. “They’ve done all the work; we want to make sure that we’re paid correctly so that our account executives are compensated and the entire organization reaches its potential.”
“I want our team to feel rewarded and challenged, as well as to prepare them for future roles,” Donarski explains. “I realized there were two main blockers to their growth: the technology they were using and the data entry they constantly had to do."
Donarski also knew that their direct bill team would continue to have to expand, adding headcount to process additional revenue as it grew. He decided to take a technology-first approach to empower his team, improve their processes, enable them to recover more revenue, and offer them more fulfilling career opportunities. He rolled out revenue automation and intelligence platform, Comulate, to do so.
“The implementation of Comulate was one of our fastest and most effective software deployments to date, producing relief to the team's pain points within the first weeks.“ says Nick Hensler M3’s solution advisor. “At M3 we've seen a wide swath of software offerings for large brokers. The Comulate team is really delivering a class of software and quality rarely seen in our industry. Combine that with their team’s responsiveness and customer focus, our success with Comulate at M3 ranks among the top of our digitization efforts. It is always great when looking for technology to also find a great partner.”
Today, M3 uses Comulate to automate its end-to-end direct bill workflow, leverages Comulate’s robust revenue integrity functionality to find and recover missing revenue, and its revenue intelligence capabilities.
“There’s no more data entry, formatting spreadsheets, VLOOKUP macro-powered workbooks, copy and pasting, or manual reconciliation” Gabriel says. “With Comulate, we just upload the carrier statement as received, without pre-processing. All the actual commissions are pulled out and irrelevant information is ignored. Comulate reconciles most revenue automatically or provides me suggestions, which the software remembers for future months. I’ve never used a product that learns from what I do and improves based on that.”
Gabriel leverages Comulate’s revenue integrity features, like configurable revenue integrity rules, to flag anomalous revenue events automatically. She and her colleagues utilize Comulate’s charts to see revenue trends over time and its suite of dynamic reports drill into variances.
With Comulate, I’m finally able to be a full-time revenue analyst.”
- Kate Gabriel, Revenue Analyst at M3
With time back from inputting and processing data, Gabriel now has time to research clients and be a more active partner to account managers. “Comulate makes the information crystal clear, and it’s available really fast, which means I’m able to see what’s happening right away,” she says. Comulate also saves Gabriel time by removing all repeat work. Before, if a policy number didn’t match, she would have to update it manually every time.
In addition to automating our revenue workflow, Comulate’s Epic integration now automatically updates policy numbers in Epic, which our account managers appreciate. Comulate’s and Applied's integration collaboration has really pushed the limits of what we expected was possible.”
- Kate Gabriel, Revenue Analyst at M3
As a result of time saved and up-to-date information, there’s better communication across M3. It’s exciting for finance partners to communicate clear takeaways to account managers and contribute to budgeting and planning conversations. And with digestible information available in Comulate, Gabriel can collaborate more effectively with and provide greater insight to M3’s teams.
With Comulate, Gabriel processes statements up to 90% faster, creating time for revenue intelligence and taking on other non-revenue processing projects within M3's finance team.
“It was normal for some statements to take me three to four hours to process,” she says. “Now, I just upload the statement to Comulate and it can be just a few minutes before I’ve finalized the statement in Epic.”
In addition to the dramatic time savings, with Comulate, M3 has begun recovering revenue using Comulate’s revenue integrity and intelligence tools; Gabriel recently recovered $10,000 from one carrier in a single day. “Without Comulate, I don’t think we would have ever realized that $10,000 was missing.” And with deeper analysis made possible by Comulate, M3 now has a more resilient revenue engine and a more engaged revenue team. “Comulate enables us to better support the sales and support teams, so they can focus on serving our clients and accelerating M3’s growth,” Donarski says.
Not only has M3 saved 90% of its revenue analysts’ time, but Donarski has also achieved his goals as a people leader. “I want to empower our teams to feel proud of how they’re contributing to the success of M3,” he says. “A big part of that is giving them the tools to become experts and elevate their roles—and Comulate has become an invaluable tool for their success by enabling them to be private investigators instead of entering data.”
For me, revenue integrity isn’t just about saving money or increasing revenue, it’s also about increasing peoples’ potential.”
- Brian Donarski, VP of Finance and Accounting at M3
“Seeing how great tools, like Comulate, can impact both our bottom line and employee engagement levels, has reinforced our belief in technology to drive our teams forward,” Donarski says. “And this is just the beginning.”
