Premium reconciliation software for MGAs falls into five groups: insurance-specific cash reconciliation tools (AutoRek, Diesta, Xceedance, receipting.ai, Brisc), insurance payments platforms (Ascend, ePayPolicy), generic accounts-receivable cash application (HighRadius, Billtrust, BlackLine, Trintech), billing inside the policy system, and outsourcing. The right one depends on where your unallocated cash comes from.
This guide is for the CFO or finance operations lead at an MGA whose team still does manual allocation. Each option is described from the vendor’s own website.
Premium reconciliation is hard for an MGA because one bank receipt rarely equals one invoice. Four things break ordinary cash application:
A single wire can settle hundreds of policy lines across several programs and carriers.
The bank amount is gross premium less commission, sometimes less taxes, fees or a credit from another policy.
It arrives as a PDF, a spreadsheet or an email table, in a different layout from every broker.
You must be able to show whose money it is, so unallocated cash is a control question as well as a workload.
In the delegated-authority books Brisc works with, matching and exceptions take a large share of a credit control team’s hours.
There are five ways to solve it, and they solve different parts of the problem.
AutoRek, Diesta, the Xceedance Cash Reconciliation Platform, receipting.ai and Brisc read broker remittances and bank data and allocate premium at policy level. Choose this group when your policy system stays and the pain is matching.
Ascend and ePayPolicy change how money is collected, so payments arrive already tied to an invoice. Choose this group when you bill insureds or retail agents directly and can move them onto a payment link. It helps less when brokers pay by bulk wire.
HighRadius, Billtrust and BlackLine match customer payments to open invoices in an ERP. Trintech focuses on reconciliation and financial close for insurers. Choose this group when your receivables look like invoices: one payer, one invoice, gross amounts.
Guidewire BillingCenter, Duck Creek Billing, Insurity and Applied Epic handle billing where the policy lives. Choose this when you are replacing the core system anyway.
A managed service runs credit control for you. Xceedance describes itself as a managed services partner and sells its platform alongside; Insurity offers billing as a service. Choose this when the constraint is people.
| Option | Type | What its own site says | Consider it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| AutoRek | Insurance cash reconciliation, within a wider controls platform | Ingests multiple broker and client formats, rules-driven matching and exception handling, cash posting and allocation, bank and CASS 5 reconciliations | You need client money reporting and financial controls across the finance function |
| Diesta | Insurance cash reconciliation and payments | Matches premium receivables to bank and virtual account transactions, reads remittance files in PDF or Excel, releases partner payouts | You want reconciliation, virtual accounts and payouts from one vendor |
| Xceedance Cash Reconciliation Platform | Insurance cash reconciliation, from a managed services firm | Extracts remittances in PDF format, matches them with broker accounts, downloads bank receipts and applies them to outstanding premiums | You want software and a service team from one provider |
| receipting.ai | Broker payment matching for underwriters | Matches lump-sum broker payments to remittance lines, posts to the underwriting system or produces a posting file, sends the rest to a suspense queue | Lump-sum broker payments and closing advices are the whole problem |
| Brisc | Insurance cash reconciliation (Reconciliation Analyst) | Reads bank statements and broker remittances as they arrive, matches by deterministic rules to policy level, queues exceptions for review with evidence | You want matching with an audit trail and no change to your policy system or broker behaviour |
| Ascend | Insurance payments and accounting | Billing, payments, premium financing, deposit matching and carrier payables in one platform for agencies, wholesalers, MGAs and carriers | You can route collections through its payment flow |
| ePayPolicy | Insurance payments | Online ACH and card payments, check lockbox with daily batching and reconciliation, management system integrations | Checks and card or ACH payments from insureds are the volume |
| HighRadius, Billtrust, BlackLine | Generic cash application | Capture remittances and apply customer payments to open invoices in the ERP, flagging exceptions for review | Receivables are invoice-shaped and live in an ERP |
| Trintech | Close and reconciliation, with an insurance page | Matches premium invoices, billing activity, collections, lockbox receipts and bank postings | You are a carrier-scale finance team standardising the close |
| Guidewire BillingCenter, Duck Creek Billing | Core system billing | Direct, agency and group billing with commission management (Guidewire); billing through automated financial operations (Duck Creek) | You run or are buying that core system |
| Insurity | Core system and billing service | Modular core software for carriers and MGAs, and billing run as a service | You want billing operated for you |
| Applied Epic | Agency management system | Applied Recon, built into Applied Epic, matches direct bill and commission statements | You are an agency on Applied Epic reconciling carrier statements |
Clear unallocated cash faster by working it daily, sorting it by cause, and fixing the cause that produces the most items. None of this needs new software.
List every unallocated receipt with date, amount, payer, age and the reason it is stuck. Tie the total to the ledger balance.
The usual causes: no remittance advice, a remittance that does not add up, a short or over payment, cash that arrived before the premium was booked, and an unrecognised payer. Each has a different owner.
For a known broker with no advice, send one consolidated query listing every open receipt.
Cash that arrives before the policy or endorsement is booked is an underwriting backlog, not a finance error. Route it there.
Record every trading name, abbreviation and paying entity per broker so the next receipt is recognised.
Decide who may approve a small short payment, so items do not wait for a decision nobody owns.
If new items exceed cleared items each week, the balance grows whatever the team does.
Unidentified funds in a trust or client money account still belong to someone. The rules differ by jurisdiction, for example state premium trust rules in the US and CASS 5 in the UK. Take advice before any write-off.
Software helps with steps 1, 2 and 5: AutoRek, Diesta, receipting.ai and Brisc attempt the allocation and present what is left as a worklist. Ascend and ePayPolicy reduce new items at source.
Yes, AI can read broker remittance PDFs, spreadsheets and email tables into structured lines, and Diesta, Xceedance, receipting.ai and Brisc all describe doing it. Allocation is a separate step, and the honest answer there is “mostly”.
Lines that carry a policy reference and an amount that agrees with an open premium can be allocated without a person. A person still reviews:
Ask every vendor whether the match is made by a rule you can read or by a model’s judgment. In Brisc, the model reads the document and rules make the match, and every match names its rule.
Brisc is insurance-only software whose Reconciliation Analyst reads bank statements and broker remittances as they arrive and matches cash to the policy it belongs to, with the source document and governing rule on every line.
More: bank reconciliation, the Reconciliation Analyst, and guides on MGA cash application, cash application in insurance, premium payment matching and the three-way match.
Run a real month of your own bank statements and remittances through it, not a demo file.
Ask what share of lines matched without a person, and how that is counted.
Ask to see why one match was made: the rule, the source document, the reviewer.
Test a net-of-commission remittance and a receipt with no remittance advice.
Confirm what goes back into your policy system or ledger.
There is no single best. To match broker remittances to bank receipts, compare AutoRek, Diesta, Xceedance, receipting.ai and Brisc on a real month of your data. To change how you collect, look at Ascend and ePayPolicy.
Unallocated cash, also called unapplied cash, is money received in the bank that has not yet been matched to a policy, invoice or client. In a premium trust account it must stay identifiable until it is allocated.
No. Tools such as AutoRek, Diesta and Brisc sit beside the policy system, read its open premiums, and pass allocations back.
It can where one payment settles one gross invoice. Test it on a net-of-commission remittance covering many policies before you rely on it.
Brisc is typically live in 2 to 6 weeks because day one needs no integration. A core system or billing replacement is a longer project.
30 minutes, no slide deck. Tell us where the volume hurts and we show you the Analyst on it. Bring a bordereau, statement or submission if you have one; you don’t need to.
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