Abstract
In 2023, ICW Group transitioned its six reporting entities to Gain Compliance. In this customer story, you will learn how Gain’s live data model transformed operations from the perspective of three members of its financial reporting team.
Key Quote
“Gain is so much faster, it’s made us much more efficient. It’s made the validations a breeze, just a breath of fresh air compared to Wings. It’s very much like going from a flip phone to an iPhone.”
Annie Mounyvoung, Accounting Supervisor, ICW Group
Background
Initially, ICW Group’s Accounting Director, Court Gardner, was looking for one simple thing from Wings/Sovos: the ability to use multiple monitors. “I just thought it was crazy that we were limited to one screen in this day and age,” he recalled.
When he learned that this was an impossibility, Court gathered the team to look at alternatives. During this process, deeper issues with ICW’s legacy software product surfaced:
- Senior Accountant Dawn Ellison, who was responsible for the face statements as well as coordinating with other people on the schedules they produced, faced a host of collaboration challenges.
- Accountant Chase Broberg, who was responsible for managing the Notes framework for all of the company’s reporting entities, had become the de facto gatekeeper for all Notes data.
- Accounting Supervisor Annie Mounyvong, who was ultimately responsible for filings with the DOI’s and the NAIC, found ICW’s reliance on legacy software made filings overly time consuming and slightly harrowing.
It became quickly apparent that legacy software had created inefficient processes for ICW that had become accepted as the norm.
The status quo, however, radically improved when ICW moved to Gain.
A Senior Accountant’s Perspective
As the lead for ICW’s face statements, Dawn Ellison coordinates with other team members on upstream schedules with shared data. This role was particularly challenging with legacy software. “It was hard to see where people were at with their pages,” she recalled. “And there was a lot of ‘noise.’ All these pages and sections in the menus that didn’t apply to us made it tough to focus on what was important.”
Relatedly, the regimented workflow required by Wings/Sovos created constraints around understanding, locating, and clearing cross-check errors.
Gain fundamentally improved Dawn’s visibility into ICW’s in-process filings. The ability to leverage a modern work environment was transformational – different schedules could be open side-by-side across several computer monitors, and Gain’s live data model produced instant, descriptive, and actionable feedback on cross-check errors.
Gain’s modern design further facilitated greater collaboration to address data consistency across the filing. “Many of the people involved with this process didn’t get involved with the validations in Wings [Sovos],” she said, “but now [with Gain], they’re able to quickly and easily check their work on their own pages.”
Finally, Gain’s more powerful rules engine translates to improved data quality and filing confidence. “There are also just a lot more validations in Gain,” Dawn continued, “and that’s what we were looking for when we were thinking about this change. Things were getting missed and we were left wondering why Wings [Sovos] didn’t catch it. We don’t have that sort of uncertainty with Gain. We’re able to focus on the quality of the data and less on the mechanics of the software.”
“It took five to ten minutes to run a validation report in Wings [Sovos], and it would take fifteen to twenty minutes to print an individual book,” she continued. “But in Gain, the validation dashboard is up and running in seconds, and when I send the books to print, it’s just boom-boom-boom and they’re all done.”
An Accountant’s Perspective
Accountant Chase Broberg found ICW’s legacy solution frustrating. “The Notes in Wings [Sovos] was a headache,” he recalled, “mainly because it was being done in Word and it took a lot of playing around to get it right.
“It’s a lot easier to do the Notes in Gain,” Chase continued. “It’s extremely user-friendly and it reduces the time we spend on the Notes significantly.”
Another improvement stems from how Gain’s end-to-end solution integrates Notes into the complete filing. “In Gain, the Notes are validated against other parts of the statement, and the validation dashboard makes it easy to see errors that impact the Notes, and fix them. The visibility into validations is just so much better”
Chase also benefits by using Gain as a collaboration platform. No longer is he the sole gatekeeper for Notes data. “Now people take control of the Notes related to their sections of the statement they are responsible for,” Chase explained. “And any issues that come up during review, they can go in and fix for themselves. It’s been a big improvement from a collaboration standpoint.”
An Accounting Supervisor’s Perspective
After a decade of using Wings/Sovos, Annie Mounyvoung is glad the company made the change to Gain.
“Gain is so much faster. It’s made us much more efficient. It’s made the validations a breeze, just a breath of fresh air compared to Wings [Sovos]. It’s very much like going from a flip phone to an iPhone,” Annie explained.
“It’s easy to navigate in Gain, to move from one page to another, and to have multiple pages open. With the screen real estate we have, we’re able to see ten different schedules at once, and you just couldn’t do that in Wings.
“Gain has made it so much easier, especially in crunch time, to meet our deadlines,” she continued. “We used to have to set aside a few hours just to run validations in Wings [Sovos]. And we would get to the end and have a critical validation error and I just felt that type of error should have been caught earlier in the process.”
Annie calculates that ICW’s time savings with Gain totals three days. “Before [with Wings/Sovos], there were occasions where we were running those last validations the day before the deadline. And with the time savings Gain has delivered over the entire process, those last steps are being completed much sooner, and we’re not frazzled by being up against the deadline to file.”
Conclusion
For large teams working on statutory financial statements for multiple reporting entities, legacy Annual Statement products tend to silo individuals into the parts of the statement for which they were responsible. These silos make it difficult to bring everything together for review and to correct issues before filing.
Gain’s modern, Cloud-native software is not only more powerful and more secure than legacy Annual Statement systems, it effectively tears down these silos, making it easier for teams to efficiently do the work of these statements.
Learn more about how Gain has improved outcomes for financial reporting teams for other carriers.