Abstract
For Fairmont Farmers Mutual Accountant Jeff Schuett, NAIC reporting was one of many finance and accounting responsibilities. As a practical matter, only a certain amount of his time could be applied to the company’s Annual Statement. To ease resource constraints, Jeff hired another accountant with whom he could share some of these responsibilities in 2021.
In this Customer Story, you’ll learn how the move to Gain Compliance made it easy for him to introduce a new person into the company’s statement processes and of the efficiencies realized with a modern, Cloud-native solution.
Key Quote
“Everything fills in automatically. [With Gain] everything is right there, and if something is changing, the indicators are easy to see. The software provides clear direction on what we need to do. It’s very intuitive.”
Jeff Schuett, Accountant, Fairmont Farmers Mutual
Background
For years, Accountant Jeff Schuett used the Booke Seminars product, TCP, for NAIC flings. In 2020, he was informed that SOVOS was discontinuing TCP and would be transitioning his account to its Wings solution.
“I was suspicious of the Wings product because we were told we needed to change over to this new and improved product they had coming out,” Jeff said. “After their presentations, I would ask the tough questions about what we didn’t see – the Notes, the Investments schedules, Schedule P. And, those questions didn’t really get answered.”
This led Jeff and his new team member, Jean, to explore alternatives and ultimately transition to Gain Compliance.
Most striking for Jeff was how quickly a person new to stat reporting become a productive contributor to the filings with a modern solution. “What impressed me about the Gain product right away was how Jean was able to go in and do the first thirteen numerical pages of our statement easily. She had never really filed anything like that before and she did it in an afternoon.”
Sharing the Work
“Doing this filing is not the only thing we do,” Jeff said. “Fairmont Farmers is a small company and we do all the daily, monthly and quarterly accounting; we prepare stuff for the boards and for meetings; and, on top of it all, we analyze the numbers. So we don’t have much extra time to spend on just doing the filings.”
From the outset, Gain gave Jeff time back. “Everything fills in automatically. [With Gain] everything is right there,” Jeff described. “And, if something is changing, the indicators are easy to see. The software provides clear direction on what we need to do. It’s very intuitive.”
Jeff noted that he and Jean share the work of the company’s Annual Statement equally. “She’s done the entire statement as part of a cross-training exercise, and now we alternate. Last year was my year; the previous year was hers.”
Through working on the company’s statement, Jean has become a second set of eyes and began sharing the review of the company’s statement. “Now we both review it before it goes out the door and the auditors see it.”
Time For Analysis
Previously, with their legacy solution, the Annual Statement was finalized in early February. With Gain, this has been accelerated to January.
One of the ways Fairmont Farmers Mutual has saved time is through leveraging an Excel workflow for data organization and upload. “The ability to export pages to Excel is great,” Jeff said. “I’ve incorporated those exports into my monthly closing worksheets, and those worksheets make it easy to populate the first thirteen pages of our statement in Gain.”
Beyond the efficiencies this Excel functionality provides, Jeff noted how this functionality has made him extremely confident in the data quality of the company’s statement. “I know the numbers are right, and I know everything matches up through the preparation I’ve done.”
Jeff described how the time savings and the increased confidence have fundamentally improved the experience of the annual filing cycle. “Gain is pretty close to automatic,” Jeff said. “We’ve used [Gain] to improve our processes, so doing the filing almost seems like a technicality. There’s a flow to it, and I don’t stress about Annual Statements anymore.”
With Gain, the time saved on statement work is available to spend on the analysis of statement data in which he is very confident. “We’re getting our statement done quicker, and we’re able to get the auditors in and out of here earlier. We begin our analysis sooner, and this puts us in a good position to make changes.”
Conclusion
One- and two-person teams tasked with NAIC reporting often wear a variety of accounting and finance hats. By removing the manual work of this reporting, Gain provides time savings that can be applied elsewhere.
Learn more about how Gain has improved outcomes for financial reporting teams for other carriers.