What Nova Medical Centers Needed in an FP&A Solution
Melissa McKenzie, Project Manager at Nova, works on the accounting team but had been burned by her experience with previous FP&A solutions. In particular, Melissa and the organization were searching for a solution that wasn’t outrageously expensive, offered in-house customer support, and was easy to use.
They also required a platform that could consolidate data from their different systems; Sage Intacct, Paycom, their proprietary software, and a few others, and could “efficiently do something with all the financials they were pulling” from these multiple systems.
Finally, in common with many finance teams, they needed a solution that ended their time-consuming manual financial reporting. Many times they found that having taken one or two months to pull vital data for their business teams, (such as volume, type of injuries coming in, how sales are performing) it had already become too old to use.
McKenzie says: “The data was all over the place and made it very difficult to provide valuable, relevant information to the stakeholders that need to see it in a timely manner.”
In summary, she described the process as “horrible”.
The Solution: Datarails
In Datarails, McKenzie found a perfect fit that met all the requirements of her wishlist. She describes Datarails as an easy-to-use system providing fast, valuable, and relevant information for her and the wider business. She has also been blown away by the customer support.
“It’s been phenomenal. It has made it so easy for us to pull our data together”
Melissa McKenzie
Project Manager at Nova Medical Centers
The native integration with Excel was also a clincher, explains McKenzie. She says: “Everybody loves Excel” and having a tool that works with Excel, and not against it, is a huge plus. The ease of use with Excel means stakeholders can just send me their Excel spreadsheets and I can work with those sheets on Datarails.”
The process is simple. With Datarails’ Data Mapper and File Boxes, she gets raw data files 3 days after the month-end and instantly uploads them to Datarails.
“I could now give stakeholders reports and graphs that they wanted to see the same day”
Melissa McKenzie
Project Manager at Nova Medical Centers
The results: Timely reporting and granular data for everyone in the org
Since the implementation of Datarails and delivering of more granular insights, stakeholders are able to look at centers by location and also map which locations feed into which regions. This also impacts the sales managers as they get to see and analyze how any region is performing and dig deep per location.
In addition, Datarails tackled one of their biggest challenges for finance: payroll. Previously data lived in different systems that weren’t talking to each other. With Datarails, Melissa can upload all the payroll spreadsheets, map them out, and share the data.
This led to better analysis letting her look at any clinic easily and quickly pinpointing injury volume, payroll cost, and any revenue challenges at a given location.
“It has made a huge difference in getting timely information out to people when they still care about it.”
Melissa McKenzie
Project Manager at Nova Medical Centers
Different Stakeholders, same benefit
Melissa explains how a variety of stakeholders from the CFO to sales, and the COO, are reaping the benefits since Datarails was introduced.
The sales team gets to benefit from dashboards that show graphs with information relevant to them and their sales targets. The partners can see the graphs but also “dig into the numbers” says McKenzie.
She adds for the COO “It’s made a big difference in how she can look at each of the centers and how they’re functioning. Datarails answers questions for them such as ‘Are we overstaffed, can we be sharing, or are we way understaffed which means we’re paying contractors too much.’”
Finally, McKenzie says “Our CFO wants to see the financials.”
Weeks of time-saving leading to better analysis and lower costs
Analyzing the benefits of Datarails, McKenzie says the payroll transformation alone has saved 2-3 weeks in time savings. Melissa’s team went from seeing only a high-level view of payroll to enjoying a more granular level incorporating teams, individuals, departments, locations, and regions.
“The big savings was we could now look at it and say, how are we at the individual level? We weren’t ever seeing that data.”
Melissa McKenzie
Project Manager at Nova Medical Centers
McKenzie adds “We went from two and a half tedious days to getting it done in less than an hour.”
At the same time their Bonus and Commission report for salespeople across their 70 locations became considerably easier once Datarails was implemented.
The same report that used to take three days to complete gets done in less than three hours (with no errors), explains McKenzie.
Senior management empowered to deliver more strategic decision-making
Melissa adds that the strategic value of Datarails benefits the entire executive team at Nova Medical delivering more strategic decision-making.
“Efficiency and revenue went up and our cost went down because everything is managed better.”
Melissa McKenzie
Project Manager at Nova Medical Centers
As a result, their data can now be used and presented in a useful, informative way. From an absence of quality data now the entire organization can make impactful decisions from their data.