Streamlining financial processes with Kim Kling, Senior Director of Finance, and Cory Sills, Director of Technology, Covenant Village

In this episode of the Post-Acute POV, our host Lee Kilmer, Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships, is joined by Cory Sills, Director of Technology, and Kim Kling, Senior Director of Finance, at Covenant Village to discuss streamlining financial processes using technology.

Join Lee, Cory, and Kim as they discuss what led to their decision to move forward with a financial technology solution, the importance of a smooth implementation process, their favorite features, and how it has positively impacted their business. Listen to their discussion below.

Topics discussed during today’s episode:

1. [00:37 – 02:45]: Lee introduces Kim and Cory before they share their origin stories, and the career stops that led them to their current roles.
2. [02:45 – 04:54]: Cory and Kim detail the pain points their organization experienced prior to adopting Enterprise Financials.
3. [4:54 – 7:08]: The pair highlight their smooth implementation experience and the hands-on support they received from the MatrixCare team.
4. [7:08 – 9:58]: Kim shares her team’s favorite features from a financial perspective and Cory spotlights features that are helpful to his team on the technology side of their business.
5. [9:58 – 11:23]: Cory and Kim provide a few examples of their users’ positive experiences using the solution.
6. [11:23 – 13:12]: The pair detail the time and cost savings they’ve seen since adopting Enterprise Financials.
7. [13:12 – 15:29]: Cory shares the impact of the ongoing support they’ve received since implementation and Kim details a recent positive interaction with our support team.

Resources

• Find out more about Covenant Village: https://covenantvillagenc.com/
• Listen to more episodes of the Post-Acute POV

Disclaimer

The content in this presentation or materials is for informational purposes only and is provided “as-is.” Information and views expressed herein, may change without notice. We encourage you to seek as appropriate, regulatory and legal advice on any of the matters covered in this presentation or materials.

©2023 by MatrixCare

Transcript

Announcer

Welcome to the Post-Acute POV podcast, our discussion hub for healthcare technology in the out-of-hospital space. Here we talk about the latest news and views on trends and innovations that can impact the way post-acute care providers work. We’ll also dive into how technology can make a difference in today’s changing healthcare landscape for home and facility-based workers and the people they care for. Let’s dive in.

Lee Kilmer

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Post-Acute POV podcast. My name is Lee Kilmer, and I’m the senior vice president of strategic partnerships here at MatrixCare. And we’re very excited to have Cory Sills, director of technology, and Kim Kling, senior director of finance at Covenant Village, here to speak to us today about how technology has improved many aspects of their business. All right, let’s get started. Kim and Cory, let’s begin with your origin stories. Early in your career, what led you to your current position?

Kim Kling

I’ll go ahead and start. I spent 25+ years as a CFO at two different community banks. I became very unhappy in my previous position. And waiting and praying for a change for about seven years, I was blessed with an answer two years ago, and I found Covenant Village, and I’ve been here since.

Lee Kilmer

That’s great. Cory, how about your origin story?

Cory Sills

Yeah, so actually, all through high school and college, I worked for a company that my father owned. And one of the clients, it was a IT company, and I worked there in the summer and on vacations, and Covenant Village was actually one of their clients that they took care of. And several years after I graduated college, they needed somebody full time, and they had asked the company if they knew of anybody, and they told me that I was always welcome to work with them as long as I wanted, but it might be a good opportunity for me to get on my own. And I thought about it and talked about it with my wife, and so here we are. So I’ve worked at Covenant Village about nine years now, but I’ve really been part of the Covenant Village family for about 20 years all the-

Cory Sills

… way back to 2004, 2003.

Lee Kilme

Wow, that’s great. Yeah, both of you, it sounds like a lot of history there. And it’s always great to hear people’s origin stories. I think everybody has an origin story, especially coming into healthcare and post-acute care. Thinking about some of your challenges that you’ve had to solve for in your organization, can you provide some examples or maybe some pain points that your organization was facing around your financial processes before implementing Enterprise Financials? Maybe Cory could start with you?

Cory Sills

Yeah, definitely. So the biggest issue we had was we were using a software that really wasn’t designed for the senior living industry or post-acute care. It just didn’t do everything we needed it to do. The way it was, we were too big for it for the amount of employees, residents we have, vendors, all that stuff. It wasn’t a good fit, and we had outgrown it a long time ago, so we were making a square peg fit in a round hole.

Lee Kilmer

Got it. Okay, excellent. And Kim, in your leadership role with finance, what were some of the challenges that you were facing?

Kim Kling

Yeah, as Cory stated, when I came on board two years ago, we had already outgrown the system. And one of the first assignments that I was given was to start searching for a software solution that we could actually grow into and use to grow for the future. And we had a lot of pain points with our previous software, with lots of manual processes, Excel spreadsheets, inadequate financial reports, and no actual true month-end closed process in place.

Lee Kilmer

All right, appreciate that. So that probably leads pretty closely into my next question here. What were some of the key attributes or capabilities that helped in your decision-making process to move forward with the MatrixCare Enterprise Financial solution?

Kim Kling

I think my reason for choosing Enterprise Financials was that it was user-friendly. And in looking at the demo, the demo modeled so much of what we were already doing, similar processes that we had, but we were just doing everything manually and using spreadsheets.

Cory Sill

And I think from my perspective was the ability for it to grow with us as we expand, as we add more service lines, as we added more features with, not just Enterprise Financials, but the Elite and RetailTracker, we were looking at some of that stuff at the time. And so the ability to be able to have all that under one roof, whenever we were ready to make that leap, was a big attraction from my perspective.

Lee Kilmer

That’s great. Yeah, I appreciate you mentioning that, Cory. At MatrixCare, we focus on the post-acute care market, so organizations such as yourselves and Enterprise Financials is designed with that in mind, so what do senior care providers need to run their businesses effectively and providing a financial solution that can help them meet their needs. Was that at all part of your consideration when you looked for a new financial solution that maybe the fit of that solution was really high when it comes to post-acute care and the types of challenges that you have?

Cory Sills

Yes. On my end it was, and we demoed several other softwares at the time, and all the softwares we did demo was tailored in the post-acute care sector, so to speak. We wanted something that could do everything, and MatrixCare was the one that stood out by far.

Lee Kilmer

Then, thinking through that implementation experience, maybe starting with you, Cory, again, I’m imagining on the IT side, you were very much involved in this. How was your implementation experience of Enterprise Financials?

Cory Sills

It was a great implementation experience. They walked me through everything that I needed to do on my side. And all the training and all of the step-by-step direction that they gave us and gave me was great. And whenever I ran into an issue or ran into a problem, they were right there to answer our questions and to help us out.

Lee Kilmer

That’s great. And Kim, your thoughts on this? I imagine, with your staff and your team, there were some workflow changes, some learning curves. What was your implementation experience like for the finance team?

Kim Kling

For the finance team, it was a great implementation experience. And in that process, too, I was actually going through some personnel transitions too, so this also created some personnel opportunities as well to get the department organized the way it needed to be organized. But in any implementation, there are always some hiccups that pop up, but the MatrixCare team, the EF team, everybody went above and beyond to help us smooth out those hiccups and to make the transition an easy one for us.

Lee Kilmer

That’s great to hear. When you think about how you’re using the system today, I’m wondering if you could highlight maybe an example or two of some of your favorite features or your team’s favorite features in the solution. Anything that helps improve their day-to-day operations or drive efficiencies or get better insight to information, anything you can think of?

Kim Kling

I think, for me, the features that I like the most are found in the resident profile on the Enterprise Financial side. First of all, the resident profile allows you to calculate entrance fees, and then you can also create an ACH file, which is the other feature I like, for drafting residents’ payments. So we no longer have to keep an Excel spreadsheet for our entrance fee amortization, and we no longer have to do double entries for drafting and posting of our resident payments.

Lee Kilmer

That’s really great. So along those lines, it sounds like you’ve had some workflow efficiency improvements then in being able to reduce a dependency on things like spreadsheets or other manual processes outside. Have you noted any time or cost savings that you can share by the elimination of those manual processes?

Kim Kling

We have, like I mentioned a little bit earlier, I talked about a transition with the personnel team in our finance department. Through a retirement, we were able to combine accounts payable and accounts receivable into one position, so that actually has been a cost savings for us.

Lee Kilme

Yeah, that’s really great. So obviously, efficiencies and just ease of use of the system helping you to really leverage a single person to do both roles and having that available through retirement. That’s very good.

Lee Kilme

Cory, coming back to the IT side for a moment here. One of the other questions that I had was, when you think about working with MatrixCare for this part of your solution, have you seen an improvement in working with a single vendor to provide not only your electronic health record solutions but also the financial systems?

Cory Sills

Yes, I have. It’s helped eliminate a lot of redundancy in entering data, and it’s also helped just eliminate the repetition of data that was there. It was really redundant for the nursing staff to be able to have their own set of data and then the administration have their own set of data on residents and then on the dining side for dining to have their own set of information and 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, so it’s really created some efficiencies throughout the whole organization.

Lee Kilmer

That’s great. It sounds like collaboration, and just like you said, efficiency is the reduction of manual data entry, and everybody probably being on the same page, ultimately, are some key benefits. If you think about just the implementation of the solution, any feedback that you’ve gotten from the organization on the success of the implementation or how you’re using the product?

Cory Sills

Right now, everybody seems to like it. We are actually in the process of rolling out Elite on the clinical side, and that process is supposed to be completed next week with the full rollout. We start the on-site usage, but thus far, with all the training, with the help that everybody from Elite over at MatrixCare has provided us, all the nursing staff here, the CNAs, they all seem to be really thrilled with MatrixCare and how the training’s went and how all the data is there, how everything they need, health records, and everything’s being built out. So far, everything, it’s great, and everybody’s really thrilled with it.

Kim Kling

Cory, I’d add to that, too. I think one of the comments that you told me from our senior director of nursing at one point was that when she first came on board about a year ago, her comment was, “Can’t we get rid of all this paper?” and you had commented to her that, “We’re working towards that,” and with them implementing the Elite side, now they’re able to do that.

Cory Sills

Correct.

Lee Kilmer

Got it. That’s great to hear. And maybe this goes along the lines with that point about eliminating the paper, but oftentimes what we hear from customers is there are certain things that they want to try to improve in, maybe metrics, it could be time savings, it might be better insight to information, might be more efficiencies in other areas. Was there anything like that that you were interested in as you approached the implementation of MatrixCare Enterprise Financials, such as driving down the time it takes to do something or reducing the time it takes to provide reporting or things like that? Anything quantifiable there that you saw?

Kim Kling

For me, I guess the most quantifiable improvement is the time that I now spend creating all the month-end financial statements and reports for all of our various departments, and I think, time-wise, I now have at least one day back to be able to focus on other functions such as our strategic master plan.

Lee Kilme

That’s great, and obviously, getting that information out to the organization a day faster as well, right?

Kim Kling

Definitely, yes.

Lee Kilmer

When you think about looking ahead, is there anything that you would be looking for, specific functionalities, features, or other things that you want to implement in the future to further enhance the experience with the product?

Kim Kling

I’m actually looking forward to utilizing the construction in progress module so that when we begin our strategic master plan expansion, I’ll be able to actually track that cost of that expansion and do the appropriate accounting necessary. And then, at some point, I may also bring in the fixed assets module, begin using that, and bring that back in house. Currently, our auditing firm handles our fixed asset tracking for us, and that is a function that I want to look at in the future.

Lee Kilmer

Sounds great. Then my last question really goes to, probably to you, Cory. I think you touched on this earlier, but just what’s been the experience after your go-live with Enterprise Financials? How has the support and the ongoing care and feeding and support for the product with working with MatrixCare gone for you?

Cory Sills

The ongoing support has been great. We’ve only had a couple hiccups, and whenever we have had them, support’s been right there to either fix the issue or to point us in the right direction. One of the biggest issue we had was whenever we first rolled out Enterprise Financials, we were under two different facilities in the MatrixCare Elite. And so the way that the data was feeding into Enterprise Financials, it was funky, and so we saw that pretty quickly after we officially went live, and so we had to back up, hunt, and go into one facility. And whenever we did that, we still had some issues with the data flowing into Enterprise Financials, but support was right there.

Cory Sills

They made sure that everything was corrected. They worked to figure out if the problem was on our end, the way we were putting it in, or if it was the way that was configured on y’all’s end, and they got it corrected, and they kept checking back with us and kept doing everything they could on their end to make sure that we were happy, we were satisfied, and that it was corrected in a timely and efficient manner, and so we were really appreciative of that.

Lee Kilmer

That’s great to hear. Kim, anything you’d like to add to that?

Kim Kling

Actually, I had an excellent experience with support here actually last week, as a matter of fact. There was a report that I needed, and I needed a different format than what the standard financial statements offered. So I called customer service, and instead of just showing me how to set up the alternate format, Jamie actually set the entire format up for me. And then she called me back and showed me how to run the report using the alternate format feature, and so everybody there just goes above and beyond in their service to us.

Lee Kilmer

That’s awesome. We certainly love to hear that, so I really appreciate that feedback. Well, Kim and Cory, thank you so much for joining us today and for your insights and your willingness to share your journey with the MatrixCare Enterprise Financial solution. We really, really appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Cory Sills

Thanks for having us.

Kim Kling

Thank you.

Announcer

That concludes the latest episode of the Post-Acute POV podcast. We have a lot of guests and topics coming up that you won’t want to miss, so be sure to subscribe. To learn more about MatrixCare and our solutions and services, visit matrixcare.com. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Thank you for listening. Be well, and we’ll see you next time.