Case study · Insurance broking
What CoPilot Insurance Brokers replaced, and what it made possible
CoPilot Insurance Brokers settles commission across agency and referrer statements every month, and it used to be done by hand from spreadsheets. We built the billing system, ran it in the shadows first, and cut over only once the numbers matched exactly. The first live run raised $97,276 in bills without one duplicate.
Last updated 3 September 2026
The week before
A monthly reconciliation where a duplicate is a real problem.
Insurance commission is finance work, and finance work does not forgive a sloppy tool. Every month, commission has to be reconciled and billed across agency and referrer statements, and a bill that is duplicated, missed or wrong is not a rounding error. It is money and it is trust.
At CoPilot, that reconciliation was manual, which meant it was slow and it was exposed to the ordinary mistakes anyone makes moving numbers between statements by hand. The risk was not one big failure. It was the quiet chance of a duplicate slipping through on a busy month.
What we built
Month-end billing, run in the shadows before it went live.
We built a system that reads the settlement data, works out the agency and referrer commission and raises the bills straight into Xero. The important part is how we shipped it: shadow-run first. It ran alongside the existing process, and we checked its output against reality before it was allowed to touch a live bill.
When it cut over, the first live run created a full month of commission in one pass: 32 agency bills worth $85,840.78 and 12 referrer bills worth $11,435.96, and zero duplicates. That is $97,276 in one run. It is the whole point of a shadow run. You do not find out whether a billing system is trustworthy in production; you prove it first, then flip the switch.
What changed
A month of bills, clean, in a single run.
The monthly commission run stopped being a manual reconciliation and became a repeatable job. The first live cutover produced 44 bills worth $97,276 across agency and referrer commission with no duplicates, and two monitored runs after it stayed clean, which is exactly the outcome finance work needs: complete, and correct.
The value is not just the time. It is that the team can trust the run, because it was proven against the old process before it replaced it.
Month-end used to carry a quiet tax: the careful, manual work of reconciling statements and the low background worry that something had slipped through. The system takes on the reconciliation and the bill creation, so the people who own the numbers move from doing the work to checking it.
What it made possible
A commission run the team can trust.
With the cutover clean, the monthly commission job becomes something the business can rely on rather than brace for. The reconciliation is handled, the bills are generated, and the people who used to do it by hand get to check and approve rather than build from scratch.
For a finance-grade process, that trust is the deliverable. A tool that is fast but occasionally wrong is worse than no tool at all, and we built this one to be right first.
Honest notes
What was hard, and what we will not claim yet.
Commission logic is specific to the business: which statement drives which bill, how agency and referrer splits work, and the edge cases that only show up in real data. The shadow run existed precisely because we did not want to trust that it should work. We wanted to see it match, month against month, before it went live.
We are also deliberately not putting a time-saved figure on this page. There is an internal estimate, but until it is verified we will not publish it, because a finance client deserves the number we can stand behind, not the one that sounds good. The bills and the zero duplicates are real and counted. The hours claim can wait until it is proven.
Curious what this would look like on your work?
A free 15-minute call with Moe. Talk through the work taking your time and find the right next step.