Financial Planning & Reporting System For Insurance Company

My recommendation to anyone who desires to implement a financial planning process and reporting system, regardless of industry, is to:

1) Be able to accurately and completely forecast the balance sheet and not just the income statement.
2) Be willing to commit to analyzing the actual results vs. the budget or any reforecasting

If you do 1 and 2 above, regardless of any industry you’re in you will have true insight into the future financial health of your organization and by monitoring actual results against your budget in (almost) real time you will be better equipped to make decisions based on current data.

This technology is already available to smaller organizations at a surprisingly reasonable cost and implementation time. I have good experience with Budget Maestro with Analytics Maestro published by Centage Corporation (www.centage.com). It was primarily designed for small or mid size organizations and should fulfill your needs, while delivering the two points mentioned above among its many capabilities.

This can be tailored to the insurance industry using typical industry drivers such as premiums by customer, average cost by customer, number of members, average premium per member (monthly amount), average number claims per class of customer, average payout per claim, and other drivers used by your company.

Once your drivers and other business rules are set up and your budgeting software is linked to your general ledger you can start to monitor results as soon as an accounting period is closed. With the analytics tool you can precisely define your reporting output, including format and analyze the available data in a more efficient and meaningful way.

One thing that is rarely mentioned when discussing budgeting and planning processes is that it may be too tedious or time consuming when compared to it's benefits.

I have heard this often......"The organization is so tied up with the processes (budgetting/planning) that it feels like that is the only thing we do year round. When one is done, it is time to start on the next!"