Abstract
In 2018, Oklahoma Farm Bureau became an early Gain Compliance customer for Notes and transitioned to the Full Filing solution several years later.
In this Customer Story, you will learn how Gain’s modern software and best-in-class support model improved outcomes for the financial reporting team and how this has provided peace of mind as the team looks to the future.
Key Quote
“Gain is great software. When you open the annual statement, it is in sync with how the printed annual statement flows, and it’s really easy to see how the sections are connected. It pairs nicely with the educational resources that are provided.”
Josef Nelson, Senior Accountant, Oklahoma Farm Bureau
Background
Chris Howard, Accounting Manager at Oklahoma Farm Bureau, was one of Gain’s early customers for its Notes solution. Chris managed the Notes reporting in Gain as well as the review of the company’s statements in the legacy Annual Statement product that he and his team had been using for years.
His experience with Gain’s Notes alerted him to the possibility that his team had become myopic to the limitations and shortcomings of their legacy solution.
For example, they had grown accustomed to the series of “patches” the vendor would send for bug fixes and version updates. The reporting team would be sidelined while the patches were reviewed and installed by their IT department.
During Annual Statement preparation season alone, Chris estimated that their legacy Annual Statement software typically required five to six patches. And, even with those updates, bugs persisted: pages wouldn’t load properly, bogus validation errors arose, and other cross-checks wouldn’t clear.
With Gain, Chris experienced a web-based, software solution that had no installed component, required no updates or IT department involvement, and was performant, stable, and user-friendly.
As Chris recalled: “In spending so many years with how that software presented information, I had gotten comfortable with it, even with its issues.”
Change Management
For the reporting team as a whole, Gain represented a move from a legacy software which, while dated, was deeply familiar. From Chris’s perspective, it was important that the people doing the larger share of the work felt as good about the change as he did. “Even with the issues, we were all just so familiar with how that old software worked,” Chris recalled.
Once the team was onboarded and began to realize benefits in Gain’s modern solution, they saw new possibilities to collaborate and to include new contributors.
The efficiencies realized freed Chris to focus on team building and skills development. With multiple retirements on the horizon, including his own, Gain’s modern and intuitive software provided peace of mind as the team began to prepare for those changes.
Leveling Up
Senior Accountant Josef Nelson joined the team from another Farm Bureau member company, Mountain West, where he had honed his expertise as a statutory accountant in the Gain Compliance solution.
He had found Gain’s solution invaluable in mastering what had been a new domain. “It was daunting at first. Like most accountants, I had a GAAP background but with Stat, it’s a whole different set of rules,” Josef explained. “It took a bit of time to get used to those new guidelines.”
“As I started assisting with the filings at Mountain West, just being able to explore the statements made this reporting more approachable,” he said. “I was able to find my way around and do some little things to help out, and that set me up for taking a more active role in Gain when I moved over to Oklahoma Farm Bureau.”
“Gain is great software. When you open the annual statement,” Josef explained, “it is in sync with how the printed annual statement flows and it’s really easy to see how the sections are connected. It pairs nicely with the educational resources that are provided.”
Future Proofing the Process
With Josef’s expanding skillset and responsibility, Chris was able to look forward to his retirement knowing that Gain’s modern and intuitive software would be helpful when it came to adding new people to the team in the future.
“He’s young and he’s sharp, and handing over some of my responsibilities over the last year has gone great,” Chris said. “And in the year ahead, he’ll be taking on even more, and I’m confident he will be ready to go when I retire.”
Conclusion
For a company using legacy Annual Statement Software, passing the torch of a company’s NAIC reporting is a worrisome proposition. Not only is the statutory reporting domain inherently challenging, the use of outdated software tools provides a further barrier to mastering the reporting process.
Gain’s modern and intuitive, Cloud-native software changes this dynamic by making statutory reporting approachable for the next generation of accounting talent.
Learn more about how Gain has improved outcomes for financial reporting teams for other carriers.