Henderson Brothers modernized direct bill reconciliation

See how Henderson Brothers, an Assurex partner, spends 60% less time reconciling commission statements.

THE METRICS

60% decrease in time spent reconciling statements
80% auto-match rate
92 statements processed a month from 51 payers

Ascend stood out in our search for a partner to help us scale intelligently due to its accuracy, support, and ability to learn from corrections.

Daniel Grealish

Head of Accounting & Finance
Customer type: Agency
Customer size: 168 employees
Products used: Cash Application, Direct Bill Automation
HQ: Pittsburgh, PA

About Henderson Brothers

As a fourth-generation, family-owned company, Henderson Brothers has grown to become the largest independent insurance agency in the greater Pittsburgh area. Since 1893, they have supported clients across both regional and international markets, offering expertise in business and personal insurance, employee benefits, and financial management.

With more than 180 employees and deep partnerships with many of the nation’s most respected insurance carriers, Henderson Brothers continues to lead with innovation, personalized service, and an unwavering commitment to risk management and benefits consulting.

Challenges

As Henderson Brothers scaled its operations, the firm confronted significant inefficiencies in its direct bill reconciliation and broader accounting processes—particularly with its existing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution.

The team had spent over a year investing in and building out their RPA workflow for their 16 largest payers. After significant time and money spent hardcoding logic and mapping complex data patterns, they found the approach wasn’t paying off. Despite the effort, the solution still required manual intervention, with the team tackling large volumes of manual exceptions month over month and ultimately proved not scalable for their biggest struggles with direct bill reconciliation.

Other roadblocks included:

• Time-Consuming Manual Work: Manual reconciliation of commission statements consumed over 70 hours per month, including repetitive data entry and verification.
• Lack of Trust in Current RPA: The bot matched only ~80% of entries but required 100% manual auditing due to accuracy concerns, undermining efficiency gains after significant time and monetary investments in the bots.
• Data Quality & Visibility Gaps: With unreliable data mapping and inconsistent policy matching, the team couldn’t confidently track revenue or identify missing commissions—estimated at up to $250,000 per year in leakage.

Recognizing the limitations of their RPA system, Henderson Brothers turned to Ascend to help replace the bots and establish a more intelligent, scalable automation solution.

We’re processing 150+ payers annually, including large carriers like Highmark and UPMC with thousands of lines per statement. But our bot just wasn’t keeping up, which made it more difficult to close our books at the end of the month.

Spencer Miller

Director of IT

Solution

Following a successful pilot in early 2025 and a clear demonstration of ROI, Henderson Brothers selected Ascend as their partner of choice to replace their RPA solution and modernize direct bill commission reconciliation with AI.

Ascend’s Direct Bill Automation offered:

• Integrated workflows within Applied Epic, ensuring Epic remains the source of truth
• AI-powered extraction and policy matching for high-volume statements with varying available datapoints
• Support for all carrier formats, with faster onboarding for new payers
• Custom transaction mapping and line-of-business separation even for complex statements, increasing auto-match to 90%+ in many cases
• Smart exception handling and transparency into matching logic and data corrections

By implementing Ascend, Henderson Brothers not only replaced their RPA solution but also unified their accounting workflows into a single, streamlined platform—empowering the team to work more efficiently.

Results

Since implementing Ascend, Henderson Brothers has not only seen clear progress but also lifted a significant burden from their team—giving them time back and restoring confidence in their reconciliation process. Tangible results from the first six months on the platform include:

• 92 statements from 51 payers processed in April 2025 alone
• 80% match rates achieved for formerly manual carriers, such as UPMC and Guardian
• 60% less time spent on direct bill reconciliation, down from 70 hours/month to 30 hours/month
• Statement-level assignment and tracking introduced to support scalable workflows
• Improved policy and transaction type matching, reducing manual clean-up

Henderson Brothers plans to continue expanding the use of Ascend across its divisions, with key initiatives including:

• Onboarding the Retirement team in late 2025
• Monthly workflows and deeper Epic integrations
• Eliminating legacy bot reliance while enhancing visibility into financial data

By investing in automation that is accurate, transparent, and built for scale, Henderson Brothers is modernizing its operations for long-term growth—empowering teams to focus on strategy, client service, and maximizing revenue.

We are committed to investing in technology that allows our teams to focus on clients and growth, not manual tasks. Ascend’s automation technology has improved our direct bill process and provided an amazing onboarding and integration experience for our team.

Noah Styles

COO