Leading Hospice Care Provider
deFacto Replaces Difficult and Poorly Architected Financial System Eliminates Error-Prone Processes and the Need for Consultants to Make Changes
Summary
The financial team of a leading hospice care organization found its monthly reporting tool poorly architected, difficult to change, and error-prone. In addition, making changes to the system required outside consultants to be employed—an expensive, disruptive and time-consuming process.
deFacto was chosen to replace the inefficient system with a more streamlined process and eliminate the need for outside consultants. With deFacto, the company has enjoyed increased productivity and efficiency in its budgeting process, and internal members are able to make changes without outside help.
Problem
The company’s financial team relied on Microsoft’s FRx as its sole tool for monthly reporting. Because of a lack of in-house technical knowledge, whenever a change was needed to the system, the team had to call in a consultant—an expensive, disruptive and time-consuming process.
Other problems stemmed from the budgeting process being handled in Excel. Gathering data for monthly calculations involved multiple tabs and workbooks that were linked within Excel and had to be pulled together to achieve consolidate views of multiple markets. As the company grew, its finance professionals experienced an increasing amount of difficulty and frustration as formulas changed and links broke, causing data to be corrupted. A need to streamline the budgeting process and gain control over reporting became a main driver in the team’s search for a more efficient and sophisticated system.
Solution
After exploring potential replacement solutions on the market, the company chose deFacto Global because of its power, advanced features, low cost, and flexibility. deFacto worked with the company’s financial team to provide the necessary training to ensure no third-party consultants would be required to make changes as in the past.
Reports were enhanced by replacing the problematic formulas and links with more stable and productive input and copying features. The deFacto solution also provided a more efficient and error-free method of analyzing revenue and expenses. Before implementing deFacto, analyzing revenue and expenses was very time consuming process to input, validate, and make changes. The process relied heavily on the internal calculation of ADC (Average Daily Census). With deFacto, the analysis has been simplified, and data can be input and used across many dimensions to calculate other pieces of data without the errors caused by obtaining the data via linking.
Results
deFacto provided a more advanced environment in which the financial team could organize its data, while enabling the team to take control of its reporting functions. Using deFacto’s multidimensional structure, its employees can now update data internally and standardize reporting with increased data visibility and drill-down features. This saved the company considerable time, headaches, and costs. The deFacto solution also provided greater integrity for the data being stored, collected, and updated in-house.
In addition, through a feature called book publishing, deFacto enables the budgeting and reporting tool to publish its reports for every market within the entity automatically, providing transparency and enabling faster financial decision-making procedures and forecasting.
With deFacto in place, the company has enjoyed increased productivity and time efficiency in its budgeting process, eliminating the need to continuously update formulas in Excel and account for all existing instances that would cause another line to be affected. By streamlining its budgeting practices, the company is able to focus more of its attention on its primary responsibilities—its clients.
About the Client
The company is a national leader in providing quality support and transitioning for terminally ill patients. Dedicated to strong business ethics, the organization focuses on training and staying current with state and federal regulations to ensure its patients and family members have the best possible experience while dealing with end-of-life care.
The monthly accounting routine required data to be accessed and consolidated from many tabs and workbooks within Excel via a labyrinth of links—a process that required an excessive amount of work and produced corrupt data.