For CCRC’s – the pressure is on to provide financial information quickly

Posted by Vicki Dash-Slesinski on February 19, 2019

In PwC's 21st CEO Survey, it was revealed that, “there are some pressures that healthcare CEOs are feeling more acutely than their peers from other industries. For example, a majority of healthcare CEOs agree that they are facing increased pressure to show business results under shorter timelines, higher than the global average.”

For Continuing Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs), regardless of whether they are nonprofit or profit-based entities, there is acute and increasing pressure to provide essential business results and data to key constituents (board or directors and/or shareholders.)  And, to provide this on a timely basis.

ERP Systems Create Gridlock

In the pursuit of showing business results under shorter timelines, CCRCs sometimes encounter these obstacles presented from their ERP system:

  • Extensive manual calculations are required
  • Monthly reporting processes that consume extensive time and resources
  • Chart of Accounts that result in time-consuming manual work-arounds
  • Inability to properly and efficiently allocate costs across entities
  • Burdensome level of maintenance issues and downtime

This list of obstacles can be summarized into two fundamental challenges impacting CCRCs:

What can financial leaders of CCRCs do to achieve their service mission while concurrently managing their financial obligations and operations?

Financial leaders - CFOs in particular - simply do not have the time to oversee manually intensive processes. More importantly, they need to move forward confident that their reports are accurate.  This Senior Housing News article, speaks to the changing role of CFOs and how they need to be prepared to deal with strategic issues such as turnover management, and how these critical matters require time and attention that should not be impeded by time wasted on report production.

Contemporary CFOs within CCRCs cannot be anchored to legacy ERP systems that were designed when the client-server model was in fashion. Those systems may require pain staking processes to extract reports plus these reports take too long to produce and may not be available in a timely manner.  Today’s CFOs are using up-to-date systems that build custom reports quickly and readily enable deeper dives to inspect and address complex issues. Plus, modern systems:

  • Improve visibility with reporting that includes both financial and operational performance metrics
  • Analyze business performance according to an organization’s unique drivers
  • Simplify the chart of accounts without compromising reporting flexibility

The Big Picture

Dashboards provide today’s CCRC CFOs with live insight and data to metrics and reports that matter. Guiding Metrics shares these 6 benefits to dashboards and how they can revolutionize the success of a business:

  1. Total Visibility into Your Business – with dashboards, you will always know exactly what’s going on in your business. You know what’s working and what’s not working.
  2. Big Time Savings – any report that you create more than once should go in your dashboard.
  3. Reduced Stress – dashboards enable financial leaders to quickly scan every aspect of business to see how it’s doing. And if there’s a problem, they know precisely who to contact to fix the problem.
  4. Increased Productivity - dashboards allow you to measure performance numerically.
  5. Increased Profits – with dashboards, you know exactly where to focus your time to increase results.

With pressure to show results sooner, CFOs need an ERP that not only provides greater visibility and reporting but also enables a quick close, budget consolidation, and seamless integration with clinical.