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