Electronic Health Reporter

By Virginia Jones, chief operating officer, Village Family Dental.

Scaling operations amidst growth can be difficult; staff begin to feel strapped for time which can lead to burn out and companies can get stuck with legacy technology. However, as a company grows into the mid-sized market, it’s normal to outgrow the tools and resources that helped them get there—sometimes it’s time for a change.

Village Family Dental is a multispecialty dental practice in North Carolina founded in 1985. In the span of a couple of years, our dental practice expanded from three to 11 locations and three ambulatory surgery centers. The company was growing at a significant rate, and our lean finance team needed to find a way to better manage the many financial workflows associated with these multi-entity operations.

We had outgrown our legacy on-premise accounting software, so we upgraded to Sage Intacct, a cloud-based solution that could more effectively handle our growing transaction volumes and automate manual data entry.

Prior to the new software implementation, our team was performing numerous manual tasks. In fact, one of our controllers was spending all of her time on manual journal entries and double-entering information from our payroll and patient management software.

Since deploying the software, our finance team was able to effortlessly scale with the booming business, increasing efficiency by 25%. In addition to offloading other tedious tasks, automating recurring entries, allocations and intercompany payables and receivables, the new technology’s consolidating and reporting capabilities enabled our team to deliver departmental reporting in under 10 minutes, a dramatic change from the 10 days it took previously.

We’ve also integrated several partner systems, including a Workforce Go payroll solution that transfers pay summaries by both department and by the provider, and our Hybrent purchasing software which provides real-time pricing and shopping for office coordinators, with orders and invoices pushed seamlessly from the point of purchase into Sage Intacct.

The automation capabilities we’ve benefitted from have not only enabled our team to focus on more important projects, dramatically reduce spreadsheet headache and keep up with the growing business, but it also saved us over $350,000 in staffing costs.

This shift to an innovative cloud-based financial system empowers us to make strategic business decisions based on accurate reporting available in our customized dashboards. I use the dashboard dimensions to drill down further into the accurate, timely data and share reports across the organization to assist internal leaders with decision making. For example, we had a specialist who was bringing in a significant sum of monies, but when we looked at the costs associated with this offer, we realized it was our lowest profit margin. With the insights from Sage Intacct, we figured out how to improve the situation and ultimately increase profitability in this area by 6%.

As the company rapidly expanded its footprint, it was absolutely vital that our finance team was able to keep up with the demand. The addition of automation technology not only eased expense allocations, consolidated reporting and purchasing approvals, and fixed assets tracking, but also gave us the flexibility and agility we needed to scale with the growing business and redefine our stature within the company as a forward-thinking partner rather than an organizational roadblock.