Most finance teams in insurance are familiar with the ‘w-word’. You know the one - workaround. The spreadsheet that sits between your policy system and your ERP. The manual process that reconciles broker remittances. The hours spent compiling bordereaux because your accounting platform can't handle multi-carrier splits.
Policy administration systems were built for underwriting, not reconciliation. They track policies, not cash flows. Generic accounting software and ERPs were built for general accounting transactions - invoice sent, payment received, job done.
Insurance finance doesn't work that way.
A single premium payment from a broker might need to be split across multiple carriers, with different commission structures, varying payment terms, and separate trust account requirements. Add GST/VAT calculations, fire levies, stamp duty, and other regulatory charges, and you have a transaction that generic platforms can't process automatically.
Claims add another layer. Payments go out to policyholders, recoveries come back in from reinsurers or third parties, and every transaction needs to tie back to specific claim and policy records across multiple entities and currencies.
Then there's Lloyd's. Syndicates face LPANs, complex risk splits, trust accounting, and regulatory reporting requirements that generic systems have never heard of. Finance teams either build elaborate workarounds in spreadsheets or accept that month-end will take all month.
Regulatory requirements change. Geographic expansion brings new complexity. M&A creates integration challenges. New products require different accounting treatments. Geopolitical shifts affect cross-border settlements. Environmental reporting becomes mandatory.
The insurance industry has lagged other sectors in digital transformation. Many businesses still run critical finance operations on spreadsheets and manual workarounds - systems that often break with change.
This means with new regulations comes months of rebuilding processes. When new territories open up, more finance people are hired to manage regional complexity manually. When acquisitions happen, integration takes a year instead of a quarter.
What insurance businesses need isn't just automation. It's a robust, configurable platform that adapts to change without breaking.
Month-end consumes entire months as finance teams spend hours manually reconciling things that should be automated. Cash sits unallocated in suspense accounts because matching payments to policies requires manual investigation.
But insurance accounting is more than just reconciliation. It's reconciliation + trust account management + bordereaux generation + regulatory reporting + financial controls + compliance, all working together as one connected system.
This means the real cost isn't just inefficiency. It's risk.
Spreadsheets are error-prone. Manual processes lack audit trails. When finance is pieced together across disconnected systems, compliance becomes really hard. Auditors want evidence and transparent processes - not excuses about why things don't add up.
When you add growth to the mix, the problems compound. More products, carriers, or markets means new workarounds and more people to manage things manually. Neither scales well.
Some tools automate reconciliation. Others generate bordereaux. A few manage trust accounts. But insurance finance isn't a linear process - it's a network of connected data and transactions.
Policy data comes from your PAS, cash from multiple banks, remittances from brokers, settlements to carriers. Point solutions solve individual tasks, not the complete workflow.
What insurance businesses need is a central hub that sits between all systems - reconciling, calculating, routing, and reporting automatically. One platform that connects everything, maintains trust account integrity, generates required outputs and provides complete, near real-time, end-to-end visibility of your cash flow.
When that platform is robust and configurable, it doesn't just handle today's processes. It adapts when regulations change, when you expand geographically, when you acquire another book of business, or when you launch new products. Finance operations become the enabler to growth, not a constraint.
Grappler is an insurance accounting platform that sits at the center of your finance operations - connecting policy systems, banks, brokers, and carriers into one central hub that reconciles cash, manages trust accounts, generates bordereaux, and produces financial reports automatically.
There's no manual handoff between steps. No data re-keying. No reconciling the reconciliation tool against the accounting system. No hoping the pieces fit together at month-end.
These aren't features you'll find in your PAS, or that you can bolt onto your ERP, or that reconciliation-only tools can deliver.
So the question isn't whether your current processes are "good enough." The question is whether they're holding your business back from what's actually possible.