Earmark On The Road

Daniel Ruettiger joins David and Blake on The Accounting Podcast at SuiteWorld 2023 to explain how his company is using NetSuite and custom integrations to efficiently consolidate and report on financial data across 150+ acquired insurance agencies.

Learn more about #SuiteWorld here: https://www.netsuitesuiteworld.com/home.html

Meet Daniel Ruettiger, Senior Associate, Finance and Accounting at High Street Insurance Partners, Inc
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-ruettiger-cpa-489200a6/

Earmark
Learn more: https://earmarkcpe.com/
Download on Apple App Store
Download on Google Play

Subscribe to
Earmark On The Road Podcast
The Accounting Podcast (formerly Cloud Accounting Podcast)

#SuiteWorld

Creators & Guests

Host
Blake Oliver, CPA
Founder and CEO of Earmark CPE
Host
David Leary
President and Founder, Sombrero Apps Company
Guest
Daniel Ruettiger
Senior Associate, Finance and Accounting at High Street Insurance Partners, Inc

What is Earmark On The Road?

Earmark On the Road takes you behind the scenes of the hottest conferences, meetings, industry events, and trade shows. Our dedicated hosts capture the energy right from the event floor, conducting interviews with influential leaders in the accounting industry, providing you with an exclusive glimpse into the most significant happenings in the accounting world. Stay tuned to discover what lies ahead for the accounting industry captains who are shaping the future.

Attention: This is a machine-generated transcript. As such, there may be spelling, grammar, and accuracy errors throughout. Thank you for your understanding!

David Leary: [00:00:10] Welcome back to the show The Accounting Podcast. I'm David Leary.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:15] I am Blake Oliver

David Leary: [00:00:16] and Blake. We are still here at SuiteWorld talking to NetSuite customers, which is kind of my favorite thing to do. I like to see what businesses are running on accounting software. Yeah, the.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:27] Keynotes are fun, they're flashy, there's a show, but it's really getting to meet the people who are actually using NetSuite. That is why we're here.

David Leary: [00:00:35] And so let's jump into our next interview. So our next interview is Daniel Rudiger. He's a senior associate finance and accounting at High Street Insurance Partners. Is that correct? That is correct. That's correct.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:46] And Daniel is a CPA.

David Leary: [00:00:48] And a CPA.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:00:48] I am a CPA, a CPAs, CPA, although give you a fist bump here, I'll have to admit that I did let it fall into registered status, so I'm not an active.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:58] Oh don't tell you got you got to be careful because now people are going to come after you and they're going to say you have to put inactive.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:01:04] I don't think you do, do you?

Blake Oliver: [00:01:05] Well, it depends on your state.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:01:06] I don't think not. Michigan, Michigan. You're allowed to use CPA even if you're registered. Oh, wow.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:12] Well, that's that's lucky. So you don't have to do your CPA.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:01:15] I don't have to do my CPA.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:16] But you know, you could do your CPA with the earmark app. Have you heard about earmark?

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:01:21] I have heard about earmark. Really listening to this podcast.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:23] That's fantastic. Yeah. Okay. Well, we won't bore you any further. I'll let David. David has many questions, so I'll let him get into it.

David Leary: [00:01:30] Let's just jump in like, you know, go to the website and you guys sell insurance for everything personal and business, high street, high street insurance partners. And then you also have insurance agencies that I guess are selling this too. Like it just seems very complicated to me. So like, what is the lay of the land like, how does this business model work and where do you fit in from the accounting department? How do you manage this?

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:01:53] Yeah, totally. So the high street was founded in mid 2018. And so from my understanding, the way that it kind of works in this world for insurance is a lot of these insurance agencies are local agencies. So the ones that we have partnered with or we have acquired are small town, rural area, small to medium sized agencies that serve those communities. So we really have a hodgepodge of all these different local agencies that now have a network that we try to provide national resources to, to be able to serve those customers. And so the way that it works from an accounting month end standpoint is a lot of these agencies actually do their own accounting. Still, we don't necessarily always take it over. When we partner with them. We allow them to continue their normal operations because we're not trying to hinder it at all. And then from a month end standpoint, we have to then take all those numbers and we have to consolidate it from a corporate wide perspective. And so I work pretty heavily on both the front end part of getting the data into our accounting ledger and then on the back end when it comes to the reporting as well.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:03:03] And over the years, we're going to try to continue to try to migrate the agencies to a common ledger. So it's actually easier to do the close. And it's not all these different systems that we're then trying to consolidate into one. So that's the goal. But again it takes a little bit of time. You're working with local agencies depending on how equipped these agencies are and how they've done their accounting in the past depends on how easy it is going to be to migrate them, because some of them could be a cash business, right, that they're kind of doing their accounting on, and now they have to be brought into this GAAP world, which is completely different. And so there's, you know, paths all along the way that's been fun to work with. But that's kind of how the model is. And they're going to continue to grow, and they're going to continue to build out that network of different agencies. And so.

David Leary: [00:03:50] So, so, so high Street's 25, six years old, basically. But you're partnering with local existing agencies that might be 20 years old. 30 years.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:03:59] Old. Yeah. These are a lot of these are like family owned agencies that like were built up maybe by 1 or 2 people that then maybe passed it to their kid or something like that, and they kind of use it sometimes as like sort of a retirement sort of account because they build up these assets, they build up these book of businesses. Right. And then it is like an asset. And so then they get a multiple on it when they're bought, and then they stay on to try to continue that growth within it. So yeah that's exactly what it is. Most of them are local agencies. They're independent insurance agencies that are in those local communities.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:35] So do they stay independent when they affiliate or partner with you or do they become part of.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:04:41] So they are a part of High Street. So when I say partner they're acquired pretty much. So High Street owns the insurance agency after that. But they typically stay on and then are given some sort of incentive to try to continue to grow that business.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:55] Got it. Yeah. Well, this makes a lot of sense when maybe in the past, an insurance agency would be handed down through a succession plan to some young agent who starts in the firm and then becomes the partner. But there just aren't there's a lot of agencies out there that.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:05:09] Need to sell. They need to sell. Yeah. They're looking to get out. So.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:13] And you're basically rolling them up into this high street agency.

David Leary: [00:05:18] Okay. You're like a big accounting firm that's doing this with smaller accounting firms all over the country. Yeah.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:05:22] Similar. Yeah. It's the same sort of concept pretty much.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:24] All right. So at High Street, what is that like what's your day to day like what do you what do you forecasting. What are you planning. Yeah.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:05:33] So we we do more of a budgeting on an annual process. So from a day to day month monthly perspective we're using like Ndpb to do all of our reporting to then empower like our regional leaders to then work with our agencies. You said.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:49] Nse.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:05:49] Netsuite planning and budgeting is what we're using currently for our financial reporting system. Yeah. So on a day to day, I'd be the individual or I'd be the one kind of building out all of this reporting so that then our regional leads could go into the system and then pull that sort of information on demand, and then be able to do certain ad hoc analysis that they have to to figure out where we need to focus our resources on.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:14] So like, what resources? What are you talking about?

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:06:19] I'd say so if we pull if we pull an income statement for a particular agency, and maybe they're not growing as much as we thought they would, it's then, you know, taking that regional leader to then work with that agency to try to dive into some of that data that might be at the local agency level, because, again, a lot of them use these agency management systems. And this is where a lot of the customer data that is sits. And so then they'll try to work with them to try to understand what's driving maybe the decline or not as much growth as they thought, whether it be an exposure sort of thing, whether it's a rate, whether they've been losing retention on their actual customers. So that's what I kind of mean when I say resources. It's kind of our corporate resources, trying to work with them to try to help them understand their business better, to be able to focus in an area so it can grow.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:11] Got it. So you've got business leaders who are responsible for region. Yes. Of agencies. Yep. And then their their job is to grow that yes book of business. And you're helping them get the data that they need to know where to focus. Exactly. But you also said that all these individual agencies have their own accounting systems.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:07:29] Yes. Depending on. So some of them have already been migrated to NetSuite. So we've already migrated 28 of the 150 that we have. But in conjunction with the accounting system, again, a lot of them use an agency management system. So they'll use a specific system related to insurance that does a lot of the upkeep, I guess, of the customers and being able to take in the insurance industry, they they'll take carrier reports and they'll have like direct uploads into the agency management system so that it can then cross match like policies and stuff like that. And so, yeah, a lot of them do have their local local books. And sometimes we have to try to marry up that data to make sure that it doesn't get out of sync. Right? Yeah. I mean, sometimes you run into issues like we have agencies that use QuickBooks, and if they don't have particular security permissions set right, they'll backdate stuff. And then we'll have to like work with them to make sure, like, hey, you can't back date. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:29] So in that kind of situation yeah this is like this is every single CPAs QuickBooks nightmare, right? Is putting transactions in closed periods or editing transactions in closed periods. It's kind of amazing that that has not been solved yet. No. Like the ability to really lock the books, right?

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:08:48] Yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:49] So yeah, that's a big pain. So like how do you so. When you get. I'm sure you have a lot. It sounds like you have a lot of of agencies that are still on, like say, a QuickBooks. How do you get that data into NetSuite? Do you are you getting trial balances from them? Yeah.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:09:05] So this is I love this this talk because this is something I'm very passionate about and it's something I've been working on for a little while. So the current process is that we'll take their reports. They'll either take their general ledger report, we'll take the trial balance report. Right. And then we have a certain mapping from their local accounts to our high street accounts. And then we go through that process, and then we get it into a format where we can import it into NetSuite.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:30] I assume you're doing that in Excel.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:09:32] I.e. mapping, sort of. It's kind of a hybrid. We we did do it in Excel for a long time. More recently I've been building out this power app. So it's in the Microsoft platform so that it tries to because they'll send us their their financials through email. Right. So with the power app tries doing is when they send an email through this group inbox, we have it will index the email. It tries to indexing the type of reports. And then there's like this little mapping process where it tries to identify the agency that's coming from the report type that it is. And then I have some like Python code and some Azure Function stuff that then will take the report that tries to clean it, pushes it back to the power app, and then it will kind of aggregate it into a massive table. And then we have another data flow that will then take our chart of accounts and then kind of marry it up pretty much.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:18] Oh, that sounds really cool. How long did it take you to build that?

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:10:21] You know, what's funny is so it's been a few, few different iterations, to be honest. So I've probably been working on it for maybe a year and a half, two years, but I haven't been working on just the power apps piece of it. That's probably been more like six months, but I tried rebuilding it initially, like just with Python, and then I came to the realization like, this is way too difficult to upkeep, it's going to be very hard to implement. And then I discovered power apps and some of the things you could do with Power Automate. And so yeah, I've kind of went down that rabbit hole and just been working through that. And it's just been a refinement process. Right. Because there's like little, you know, ways you have to process flow things.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:55] So it sounds like it gets stuck sometimes.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:10:58] Oh, it definitely gets stuck. And you have to be very conscious. Like I've been trying to figure out how do you build things out in a way where if it breaks, you don't have to redo the whole process, right? So it's like you have different tables where if I can't identify which agency this email is coming from, it gets pushed to a table. So a user then goes in and then manually works. If they can't identify the report type again, then the user is going to have to go in and then manually work it and then kick it back off to be able to actually try processing it. So there's always going to run into instances, instances where you get stuck and it's really just trying to be thoughtful for how you build that process out so that you can work through it and not have to, like, blow up the entire process. Right? So it's like building it in a modular way so that the pieces fit together, but can still be performed separately.

David Leary: [00:11:43] And are you writing all this code like, do you have a little code background?

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:11:47] Yeah, I'm an accountant.

David Leary: [00:11:49] I mean, you're doing a lot of accounting.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:11:50] I just got in. So you know what's funny? So when I started at Steelcase when I was in college, I've always been interested in coding. I'm a techie guy. I never had any formal experience. I think I took like a course in high school, a Java course and stuff like that. And so I got into VBA because my, one of my managers at the time wanted to do a specific report in Excel, and there wasn't there wasn't a real way of doing it with just functions. And so I had to write this code to then try to figure out how you do this particular chart, and then it just kind of evolved from there. And I've really had a passion for doing that, because I can see there being a lot of efficiencies gained through doing little coding, stuff like that. And then we've been building out a data lake at my particular company as well. And so they've been doing it all in Python, and I always wanted to have a reason to learn Python, but didn't have a good one. So I just kind of started jumping in learning how to use it. I use pandas a lot, so it's just like a data. It's like data transformation. So I build functions to then clean reports pretty much with Python scripts and stuff like that.

David Leary: [00:12:54] So then. You guys are sweet from day one.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:12:57] No. So when I came on, we were on Sage Intacct and then we ended up moving to net. Sweet, I think end of 2021. Yeah, it's.

David Leary: [00:13:07] Been about two years in a year and a half. Two years almost. Okay.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:10] Got to ask why?

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:13:11] Well, it was because. So we were going through a crazy growth period right when I came on. And it was getting kind of unmanageable in our current accounting system. And the way they had it set up in the accounting system is that they were trying to have GAAP data and Pre-acquisition data all in one that then fed into our financial reporting system, and it made it very difficult to manage. And it was kind of hard to split the two. Or you had to remember very specific ways if you wanted to just run it for GAAP. So it was just becoming unmanageable and it didn't make sense to then try to move the agencies on to that platform. And so they really then wanted one that was going to be able to manage the growth and then bring agencies onto a common ledger.

David Leary: [00:13:51] So when you're going to have all the agencies on a common ledger, all they all get getting get their own. Net suite implementation individually. Or is it just they have access to a parent. Net suite. Like how does that work.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:14:02] Yeah. No it's more of like they just get a license and then our admin has to set up their particular access like admin or their rights to then be able to just see it for their particular agency, their entity only.

David Leary: [00:14:14] Okay. That makes sense. That makes sense.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:17] Do you keep the entity like it becomes when you acquire the entity? I mean, this is this is really in the weeds, right? Like like the agency is a business entity. Yep. Does High Street acquire the business entity.

Speaker4: [00:14:29] So yeah. Yes, yes.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:14:32] Well it depends I guess they have acquisitions that are the full entity and then they have book purchases. So in the insurance world you can just buy a book from a particular person, right. If they have a clientele list and stuff like that because it's like an asset. So they'll do fold ins as well where they do acquire and then they'll roll it into another agency as well. So it kind of depends. They do both.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:56] Well, I imagine all of this must get really quite complicated.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:15:00] Yes, it definitely does get complicated. And that's why we eventually ended up switching because it was been it was hard to manage in our environment. It's been much easier since we switched over doing the consolidating, doing the reporting in NSP and then managing it in NetSuite as well. It's been phenomenal, honestly. It's made the reporting so much more streamlined and easier to pull. So yes, it's complicated.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:25] So you're using planning and budgeting. Any other modules.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:15:29] We it's just mainly planning and budgeting. We are looking into other modules but we just haven't we haven't, you know, hit the trigger at all on any of those. But we do use NetSuite. Right. But and then we have third party stuff as well. Like I know we're doing certain bank reconciliations right. In NetSuite. They have certain like expense reporting that feeds into NetSuite automatically. So there are other things they're doing, but it's not. It's third party add ons I think to NetSuite.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:55] And sorry David, it sounded like you were going to say so.

David Leary: [00:15:58] You've done all this automation stuff to obviously make you more efficient. Are you doing anything with AI or using AI functions right now? I mean.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:16:06] I've been exploring AI, so the AI that I've been recently kind of exploring is the new AI builder that the power platform has rolled out. So like for an example, we've been using this I've been trying to implement this in the last few months to try to take bank statements and then read some of the information off of it, so that our other associates don't have to manually go in and then scrape that data out. So I in that sense, yes. And I do know that they use it not necessarily for our accounting, planning and budgeting, but for our data lake. They do some, I think, with data mapping and stuff like that as well.

David Leary: [00:16:42] It's good.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:44] Um. I can't think of my question. That's all right.

David Leary: [00:16:46] Did you ask the how much of the suite?

Blake Oliver: [00:16:49] Well, that's. I guess that's what I was getting at with, like, you're using planning and budgeting. You've got, you know, that's the main thing you spend your time in is doing.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:16:57] Yeah, I probably split my time. Oh, again, with the power platform stuff that I do in the front end. And then with the planning and budgeting, I don't live, I do a little bit of. Net suite, but not very much at all. I'm not I'm more in the financial reporting end, not as much on the accounting end.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:12] I remembered my question what brings you to Suite World? Why do you travel all the way here from Michigan? Yeah.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:17:19] So I mean, I was invited last year because we were we were implementing planning, budgeting at that time. And then this year as well, we came back and now I'm doing a couple of like, I'm doing a presentation and I think an hour or so.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:33] So what's the topic.

Daniel Ruettiger: [00:17:35] Planning and budgeting. So I'm talking through our planning and budgeting and kind of how it's improved our reporting and budgeting processes and stuff like that. That's great.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:42] Well I'm sure everyone there will get a lot out of it. This has been a really great conversation. Thanks, Daniel.

David Leary: [00:17:48] Thanks for joining us. Yeah.

Speaker5: [00:17:49] Thank you.