How technology streamlines financial processes in long-term care

Challenges and pain points

Just two years ago, we were having a lot of issues with our financial processes. The software we were using simply wasn’t designed for the senior living industry or post-acute care. It didn’t do everything we needed it to do. In fact, we had outgrown the software a long time ago. Using it was like trying to make a square peg fit in a round hole.

Our system was complicated further with an array of manual processes, Excel spreadsheets, inadequate financial reports and no actual true month end close process in place. It was clear we needed to find a software solution that would solve our immediate issues while preparing us for future growth. 

Finding a better solution

After demoing other software in the post-acute care sector, we found that MatrixCare was the only one that stood out by far. Of the many key attributes and capabilities their EF solution offered, the one we liked the most was its user-friendliness. The demo modeled so much of what we were already doing – but we were doing it manually and using spreadsheets.

We also really liked EF’s ability to grow with us as we expand and add more service lines and features – not just Enterprise Financials but the Elite and RetailTracker as well. The ability to have all that under one roof whenever we were ready to make that leap was a big attraction from our perspective.

The implementation experience

From an IT perspective, it was seamless. MatrixCare walked us through everything that we needed to do. The training was smooth and professional – and if we ran into an issue, they were right there to answer our questions and help us out. For the finance team, it was also a great implementation experience.

Favorite improvements: time and cost savings

Now that we’ve been using EF for a while at Covenant Village, the features we like best are found in the resident profile. It’s easy to calculate entrance fees and create an ACH file for drafting residents’ payments. We no longer have to keep an Excel spreadsheet for our entrance fee amortization or do double entries for drafting and posting our resident payments. Workflow efficiency, in general, is much improved.

Enterprise Financials has also helped eliminate a lot of redundancy and repetition of data. It was wasteful for the nursing, admin and dining staff to each have their own set of data on residents. Now, it’s all in a single area so one person can add all the information on the residents and then the other department can access that resident and then build upon it. In fact, the solution has created numerous efficiencies throughout our organization. We no longer have to create custom reports for example – they’re all automatically generated by MatrixCare.

Another feature we love is the capital project cost tracking. We did not have anything like that before. Now we can make sure that we’re staying within budget on capital projects. Another quantifiable improvement is the time saved in creating all the month-end financial statements and reports for all of our various departments.