As a nonprofit funded by Medicare and Medicaid, Community Care, Inc. must manage a complex network of providers, caregivers and patients. The organization first implemented an automated budgeting tool in 2004 to help streamline financial activities, but the endeavor failed as the software wasn’t intuitive enough to be used by operations managers. Frustrated, users deployed workarounds that ultimately created too many budget updates with too little accuracy. Further training was met with resistance as it took away time from critical case management activities and the organization’s focus on member care.

The organization resorted back to Excel spreadsheets to manage the budget giving each department responsibility for updating and managing its own worksheet which was then further grouped by functional area. Consolidating all that information manually was grueling and offered no guarantees as to the accuracy of information. As the organization began growing more rapidly, managing the budget by this manner became even more ineffective. When Director of Reimbursement & Financial Planning executive Kyle Raeder joined the company he and Community Care, Inc.’s Chief Financial Officer Lawrence Paplham knew the time had come to evaluate and deploy a more robust budgeting and forecasting tool.