Did the Knowledge Come With It?
Several years ago, many insurance companies began moving portions of their accounting work overseas. The reasoning made sense at the time. A larger, less expensive workforce could handle routine accounting tasks, giving experienced finance teams more time for reporting, analysis, and strategic planning.
For some companies, the results did not meet those expectations. The work was not becoming more efficient or accurate, communication became more difficult, and questions often had to pass through several people before anyone could explain the answer.
Those companies began bringing portions of the work back in-house.
The tasks came back, but the knowledge did not always come with them.
The Work Returned in Pieces
By the time the work returned, many accounting processes had been separated into individual transactions.
One person received a number and entered it where instructed; someone else moved it into another system, and yet another updated a spreadsheet, ran a report, or reconciled the final balance.
That structure may have made it easier to distribute work across an overseas team, but it also separated employees from the full process. Each person knew how to complete an assigned task, while fewer people understood where the information originated, why it was handled a certain way, or how it affected the final financial results.
When organizations brought the work back in-house, they often brought back those same divided responsibilities.
The result can look like an insurance financial production line. The team completes the work, but the people closest to the numbers may not have enough context to recognize when something looks wrong, explain why it changed, or understand how it affects the company’s broader financial picture.
Bringing Work Back Is Not the Same as Rebuilding the Process
Moving accounting work back inside the company can address some of the communication and quality problems that led to the decision. It does not automatically reconnect the process.
Employees may inherit the instructions, spreadsheets, and individual responsibilities without receiving a complete explanation of how the process fits together. When a number looks unusual, finding its source can require working backward through several people, departments, and systems.
A finance team’s value is not limited to moving numbers from A to B. It also comes from having people who understand the business and accounting well enough to ask:
- Does this make sense?
- Why did that account spike?
- Why don’t these numbers align with what another part of the business is reporting?
- Is this what happened during the month?
- What will leadership want to understand when reviewing the results?
Those questions are difficult to answer when the process returned in pieces and employees were assigned only one part of it.
The Offshore Process May Still Be Running In House
Bringing the work back does not mean the company is starting with a clean process.
Spreadsheets may have been created to pass information between teams. Reports may have been designed around the former division of responsibilities. Manual steps may exist because one group could not access another system. Several people may still touch the same information because the process was designed for work performed across different geographies.
Those steps can remain long after the overseas arrangement ends.
The company may also have a very capable software solution and still spend hours, or sometimes overnight, running reports. If something is wrong, someone has to identify the issue, make the correction, and run the report again.
The system itself may not be the problem. It may still be supporting a process shaped by an operating model the company no longer uses.
Leadership can invest in technology, bring the work back in-house, and add people to the team while the former offshore process continues underneath it all.
The strategic question is not only whether the work now happens internally. It is whether the company redesigned the work when it returned.
The Cost Goes Beyond the Hours
Leadership can count manual work in hours and payroll expense, but those figures do not capture the opportunity cost of what the finance team is unable to do while its time is consumed by that work.
When experienced finance professionals spend their days tracking down data, entering information again, researching unexplained differences, rebuilding reports, or moving numbers between systems, they have less time to analyze results, identify trends, plan ahead, and explain what is happening in the business.
The information can also become less useful.
When putting the numbers together takes too long, leadership may not receive important information in time to support strategic decisions. A basic follow-up question can turn into hours of research when only a few people understand how the original process worked.
A determined team can maintain this structure for years by learning which spreadsheet has the answer, which adjustment is always needed, and who can find the missing information. Reports are completed and deadlines are met, while the effort required to keep the former process running remains largely invisible to leadership.
More People May Support the Process Without Correcting It
It is not uncommon for insurance finance teams to be overwhelmed when offshore work is brought back in. The immediate need often looks like a staffing problem.
Reporting deadlines are approaching, reconciliations are stacking up, and the team does not have enough people to complete everything. The company may genuinely need additional accounting support.
Leadership should also ask why the work requires so many people.
The answer may not be the volume of accounting work alone. Some of the workload may come from duplicate entry, repeated reformatting, disconnected departments, outdated handoffs, or system functions that are not being used.
The team may not identify these issues as process problems. Everything has always taken this long. There has always been this much Excel. Several people have always touched the same information.
As far as the employees know, this is simply what insurance accounting looks like after the work comes back.
Adding people can keep the process moving. It does not tell leadership whether the process inherited from the overseas model still makes sense for an internal finance team.
Reconnect the Work, Knowledge, and Systems
When people work inside the same process every day, they become very good at navigating it. What is more difficult to see is which steps remain necessary and which ones survived only because the work once crossed organizational and geographic boundaries.
TAC₄ Solutions talks with the people who create, handle, review, and use financial information across accounting, finance, IT, actuarial, risk, operations, and leadership.
We look at where the data originates, how it moves, what each team understands about the information it handles, whether the process is documented, and where the company depends too heavily on one person’s knowledge. We also identify where systems or departments are creating additional work for each other.
The purpose is not to recreate the former process more efficiently. It is to determine how the work should operate now that it is back inside the company.
Some improvements may be relatively simple. A report can be configured differently, a manual step can be removed, information can arrive earlier, or an existing system function can take over work employees are completing manually.
Other changes require more planning. They may involve connecting systems, changing how data moves, rebuilding reporting, redefining responsibilities, or changing how departments work together.
Our team organizes what we learn into quick wins, larger improvement opportunities, and longer-term changes. Leadership can then see what each option would address, what it would require, and what role TAC₄ can play. The client decides what should come first.
Bring Back More Than the Tasks
The decision to bring accounting work back in-house may solve only part of the original problem.
The company also needs to restore the process knowledge, business understanding, and accountability that were separated when the work was divided into transactions.
The goal is not to help an internal team complete the former offshore process faster. It is to give finance enough time and context to question the numbers, explain what changed, connect financial results to the business, and support leadership’s strategic decisions.
TAC₄ applies knowledge gained across insurance finance and system transformation projects to identify what the company inherited when the work returned, where unnecessary effort remains, and what should change now that the organization has responsibility for the full process again.
If the work came back but the full picture did not, TAC₄ can help leadership understand what the finance team inherited and decide what should change.
The company needs to restore the process knowledge, business understanding, and accountability that were separated when the work was divided into transactions.
Talk with TAC₄ about reconnecting the work, knowledge, and systems.