Electronic Health Reporter

By Ashmi Shah, senior vice president, finance, Talix.

The healthcare industry has experienced significant changes over the last few months. According to a recent report by Deloitte, physicians are increasingly being asked to provide cost-effective and quality care in an effort to curb rising healthcare costs. While they have traditionally been mainly focused on delivering the quality of care, physicians are now required to deliver the best results while also making sure to properly manage the use of resources to do so.

Talix helps the healthcare industry transition from fee-for-service models to value-based care tied to patient health outcomes. As a cloud-based risk adjustment platform, the company equips U.S.-based healthcare insurers and providers with the ability to use complex patient data to improve the accuracy and speed of claims, eliminating error-prone manual work in a heavily regulated environment. By doing so, insurers are able to leverage actionable intelligence that drives better patient outcomes, accurate reimbursements and improved efficiencies.

However, efficiencies also had to start within. Talix was looking for a robust and sophisticated financial management and planning system that could allow the company to achieve huge gains in scale, speed and generate valuable business insights. Its financial operations traditionally relied on Quickbooks and Excel, which proved to be inefficient and provided limited visibility to the company. In addition, the use of Excel spreadsheets, especially when multiple revenue components are involved, can be very time consuming and prone to mistakes. The tools did not allow Talix to track activities at a deeper level and it increasingly became a challenge for its three-people team to make the three-week close period.

The company then implemented Sage Intacct’s financial management platform, which allowed it to generate deep reporting to support the company’s data-driven decision-making, track profitability and other key business metrics at a highly granular line of business and product level, as well as streamline multi-element revenue and other aspects of its accounting function.

By doing so, Talix was able to reduce the time it took to track revenue from a four day period to just one day. The company also introduced new efficiencies through the platform in the form of automated processes, mainly in its billing function which had two significant impacts: they were able to process bills in half a day as opposed to five days and dramatically cut its days sales outstanding (DSO) from five months to 45 days. By introducing these efficiencies, Talix was able to generate new cash flow that left the company with $3 million in unanticipated cash at the end of 2018.

A combination of Adaptive Insights and Sage Intacct also allowed Talix to step up its forecasting models which were previously built in 20-tab Excel spreadsheets by allowing the company to slice and dice the data with granularity, highlighting the areas of profitability at the business line and product level. This allowed Talix to build out a five-year forecast based on customer success, sales, product and other drivers in a matter of hours as opposed to days if they were still using Excel. This level of detail has been invaluable in securing investor funding, including a Series B round in 2018.

The ability to delve deeper into financial data more efficiently offers invaluable opportunities to serve customers and allows the Talix team to focus primarily on helping drive business growth.

These cloud based technologies have made accounting life much more easier as they integrate with other accounting apps such as Shopify, TSheets and Microsoft 365 business premium. You can also adopt to tools such as QuickBooks Dedicated Server hosting for easy remote accounting from anywhere on any device.