How Redman & Company Consolidated Payment Vendors to Reclaim 10+ Hours Per Week
Ascend has significantly streamlined our payment workflows — from onboarding to carrier payables. The platform is intuitive, efficient, and designed with real agency operations in mind. What previously required multiple systems and manual tracking is now centralized and far more manageable.
About
Founded in 1992, Redman & Company Insurance is a second-generation, family-owned independent insurance agency built on a mission of service, integrity, and community impact. The agency believes insurance is more than just a policy—it’s a promise to protect what matters most.
The team strives to create a positive, encouraging workplace while delivering exceptional insurance products and client service. This values-driven approach has helped the agency build long-standing relationships with clients and a reputation for trusted guidance.
Challenges
As the agency continued to grow, leadership began looking for ways to modernize internal processes so their team could spend more time serving clients and less time managing administrative work. Like many independent agencies, Redman & Company relied on a combination of systems to manage billing, payments, and accounting. While each tool served a purpose, the lack of integration between them created operational inefficiencies that increasingly strained the team.
Manual and time-consuming billing processes
Invoice creation and agency bill workflows required extensive manual effort. In some cases, preparing and verifying an invoice could take up to an hour per policy, especially when producers needed to manually calculate commissions, fees, and payment schedules. These manual calculations sometimes led to billing errors that had to be corrected later in the accounting process.
Multiple disconnected systems
The agency’s billing workflow spanned several platforms—including HawkSoft for agency management, QuickBooks for accounting, ePayPolicy for payments, and Capital Premium Financing for financing arrangements. Because these systems did not fully integrate, accounting staff frequently had to reconcile transactions manually between platforms to verify payment status and ensure financial accuracy.
This fragmentation also created visibility challenges. Team members often had to check multiple systems to confirm whether a client payment had been received or properly applied.
Manual carrier payables and trust account management
Carrier payables required logging into individual carrier websites to send payments, adding another manual step to the process. At the same time, the agency had to carefully track trust account funds and ensure money moved accurately between accounts.
For the accounting team—who were already balancing multiple responsibilities—these processes created a growing operational burden.
Administrative work pulling producers away from clients
Because billing workflows were so manual, producers and account managers frequently had to step in to resolve payment issues, send payment links, or clarify billing details.
This meant valuable sales and client advisory time was often replaced with administrative work, limiting the team’s ability to focus on revenue-generating activities.
As Redman & Company worked through a backlog of billing reconciliation issues, the leadership team recognized an opportunity to modernize their processes and start fresh with a more streamlined system.
Solution
Redman & Company implemented Ascend to unify its agency bill payment workflows and reduce manual administrative work. Ascend introduced a centralized platform that sits alongside the agency’s existing systems, simplifying how payments are collected, tracked, and reconciled.
With Ascend, the team was able to:
- Centralize payment collection and tracking in one platform
- Automate carrier payables instead of logging into multiple carrier portals
- Access detailed reporting for commissions and fees
- Improve visibility into payment status across the agency
- Reduce reconciliation work between HawkSoft and QuickBooks
During onboarding, the team also learned how Ascend’s FBO account structure simplifies the handling of agency funds while maintaining proper financial controls.
In addition, Ascend’s reporting tools allow staff to search transactions by client name, payment amount, or date—providing clearer visibility into receivables and commission breakdowns.
By consolidating processes that were previously spread across several systems, Ascend helped Redman & Company establish a more efficient, unified workflow.
Results
With Ascend in place, Redman & Company significantly improved the efficiency and clarity of its agency bill operations.
I can’t imagine going back to juggling multiple tools that still left operational gaps. Ascend has become a true workflow solution, not just a payment processor.
Ascend is a big step forward for us - before, it was hard to answer any payment question from agents. Now, we have full transparency and know what was paid, how, and when with complete accuracy.