Get Real-Time Financial Insight from Your Multi-Location Healthcare Practice
As a Sage partner focused solely on Sage Intacct, Roghnu specializes in selling, implementing, supporting, and optimizing Sage Intacct for multi-entity/location healthcare environments. In this blog post, we explore a few key strategies employed by Roghnu to help multi-location healthcare companies streamline operations, condense close times, and automate transactions reducing the reliance on Excel for complex activities outside the ERP.
First, let’s see if we are striking a chord with your organization.
Limited real-time insights. Does your team obtain the real-time insights needed to make decisions that grow your multi-entity healthcare practice or are you making decisions based on outdated or stale data? Are your decisions accurate in hindsight?
Lengthy month-end close times. You want to close your books as quickly as possible, but it often takes you 15-20 days, or more…
Manually inputting inter-entity transactions. This allows personnel less time to make tactical and strategic decisions not to mention manual entry is error prone and an expensive deployment of human resources.
Using Excel for complex accounting activities. How do you automate your reporting process? Excel was not designed to effectively support the consolidation and distribution of multi-entity healthcare practice financial statements. While Excel has and will continue to have a place for accountants its use should be more aligned for one-time analysis rather than being the backbone solution for data reporting.
If the points above resonate with you and your organization, then read on.
Streamline operations and shorten your month end close time
Roghnu, in collaboration with Sage Intacct, offers a game-changing solution through Multi-Entity Consolidations. Managing finances across multiple locations can often be a cumbersome process, specifically during the financial close. Traditional methods involve reconciling individual entities manually, leading to extended close times and increased opportunity for errors.
To keep it simple, the longer it takes to get information into and out of your accounting system, the longer a close process takes. This means decision makers are facing outdated metrics during their board meetings and general business analysis. With many locations, there are generally many stakeholders that rely on their specific location(s) data to evaluate their financial health.
With a smooth process setup by Roghnu and Sage Intacct, we help ensure your business can make timely decisions. We have customers that have reduced their close times from two and three weeks to a week or less.
Automate inter-entity transactions
Purchases for goods and services, loans, management fees, dividends, cost allocations, royalties, etc. are all good examples of inter-entity transactions where a business needs to transfer funds and costs between entities. Entities can include branches, divisions, departments, funds, projects, trusts, or multiple companies in an organization. Labor expense, time, and errors occur as companies expand with a system or systems built for single-entity organizations. As the business expands your multiple entities each have many instances to report on and consolidate. This inefficient way of handling transactions has a domino effect that results in:
Consolidations take weeks and are at the risk of errors.
Late nights and weekends requiring overtime and burning out employees.
Delivering books to board meetings far too late to be of much use.
The automation of inter-entity transactions greatly improves close time and the quality of data thanks to the Sage Intacct process standardizations. It is easier to expand your locations, grow your services, and manage them all without growing your accounting team with this automation.
Case Study
One healthcare provider was experiencing growing pains with its on-prem accounting system and was performing hours of manual accounting work for their seventeen (17) offices and five (5) entities. Each entity had its own software instance but couldn’t have more than two instances open at once. And there was no consolidated chart of accounts. With Sage Intacct the consolidation is in real time and inter-entity transactions are automated. No longer did they have to manually enter data at both an entity and consolidated level, taking 15 days to close the books.
Right size the need for Excel
Accountants are used to Excel and let’s be honest, Excel is a great tool for analysis, ad-hoc validations, and quickly pulling small data sets data together. We know you love Excel, and we don’t see a reason to focus on eliminating it altogether. While Excel has long been an operational mainstay, it has limitations and risks. With Sage Intacct and Roghnu’s focus on automating consolidations, inter-entity transactions, and real time reports we can limit the need for Excel and limit the risks we see when it is overly relied upon for financial reporting.
Excel shortcomings examples include:
Building and operationalizing reports using Excel can be a pain as you access your financials from different systems and bring them together using Excel tabs for data reference. When you have limited access to your data (e.g. pulling reports or web services extracts) the process can be that much harder to create a report that is valuable, timely, and easily refreshed.
Take a chart of accounts for example. You probably have separate accounts for every combination of location, department, line of business or service. This can get out of hand even if you have just a few entities. Think of the time it takes to create a report based on one type of service across all locations and departments. You could scroll through hundreds of accounts and then repeat that process across dozens of Excel tabs. Then you’re stuck for days manually exporting and importing data, sorting through the transactions, and creating rules to get the reports you want. It doesn’t take much to face unwieldy spreadsheets or you find someone that can do this quickly, until they are out sick, on vacation, or quit.
Sharing complex Excel reports with pivot tables and formulas can be challenging and once the files are emailed there is generally little security in keeping them in the right hands.
Sage Intacct Advantage
With Sage Intacct, you’re not forcing different people to create the same report and re-enter the same data. Sage Intacct brings it all into one system. It has built-in and customizable reports so you can look at the data any way you want to:
Get real-time insights into the KPIs that matter.
Compare dimensions across locations.
With Sage Intacct, you simply need the base account and then apply the dimensions to track what matters to your practice. Then you can adjust your strategy and tactics accordingly. The dimensions are captured at the source when you create a transaction and there is no need to tag them when you try to run a report. With Sage Intacct dimensions, you’ll work from a lean chart of accounts. And anyone on your team can grab reports from this single source of truth. As you automate processes for reporting, you’ll have reports faster enabling you to make business decisions based on the most current data.
Again, Excel is a great tool if fine within its limits. But it can only take you so far. Sage Intacct was made for multi-entity practices like yours and can save you hundreds of hours in data entry, consolidations, and reporting.
Conclusion
Being the finance leader of a multi-entity healthcare practice, you do more than just create reports and close the books. You make strategic decisions.
Roghnu will make Sage Intacct your source of truth for financial and operations data that powers your decisions.
With Roghnu and Sage Intacct, you:
See your company at a high level.
Create consolidated views.
Benchmark entities against each other.
Maintain compliance by creating as many GAAP, IFRS and tax books as you need.
Enable everyone with access to the same information, based on their security privileges, from which they can easily get customized insights so different offices don’t have to try to create the same report on their own.
Deliver personalized dashboards for managers letting them make strategic business decisions based on entity-specific metrics.
Because practices sometimes share patients, you can have a consolidated view of patients while having the flexibility to create lists at the local level. Note, Sage Intacct is not your medical records solution. Roghnu will work to abstract patient data minimizing PII from your accounting system.
Tie your revenue and expenses down to the service and patient level.
Use reports to drill down to the regional level. Track productivity and profitability to determine which regions to continue working in, all without labor-intensive spreadsheet manipulation.
Provide valuable operational insights to your executive team. All by moving to the cloud with Sage Intacct for better reporting accuracy; less money spent on overtime costs; and run reports from where you are and what device you are working on.
Stop working from outdated information. Address issues with confidence because you have the data to back it up. If you have three or more entities and are starting to run into some of these slowdowns, don’t wait until they impact the momentum of your company.
Tell Roghnu the processes that are holding back your practice and let us help.