Fast Facts
Industry: Healthcare
Location: Carrollton, MO
Employees: 250+
GL System: Dynamics GP
Testimonial
“Having the data automatically input from Dynamics GP into Planning Maestro and having everything in the right spot at the end, it’s been a nice upgrade for us.”
“I have used other budgeting software in the past and Planning Maestro is one of the most user friendly ones out there.”
Lesley Delaney
CFO
Carroll County Memorial Hospital
Sophisticated Budgeting and Ease of Use Foster Collaboration & Accountability
Carroll County Memorial Hospital is a 25 bed Critical Access Hospital with over 250 employees located in Carrollton, Missouri. CCMH provides emergency services, diagnostic services, day surgeries, outpatient specialty clinics, rehabilitation services, family care, cancer care and much more. Since opening its doors in 1961, CCMH has lived up to its mission which states “We are Dedicated to the Health and Well-being of All We Serve” by serving the needs of the region and helping generation after generation reach better health. Carroll County Memorial Hospital is loyal to their community and continues to strive for excellence in healthcare.
Challenge
Like many organizations, CCMH had been using Excel for budgeting and planning. According to Lesley Delaney, CFO, in addition to the cumbersome nature of using spreadsheets, with the manual data entry and broken formulas, one of the biggest challenges was not being able to provide the different departments the ability to be involved in their portion of the budgeting process.
“We wanted the directors in each patient care area – from rehab to radiology to the surgical unit and onward – to have access to their budget information so they could be involved and take ownership, which was difficult to do in Excel,” said Ms. Delaney. She also noted that in addition to the challenges of having everyone access the same spreadsheet, it was also difficult to track budget numbers as they changed and easy to make a mistake.
Solution
Because of the limitations they were finding with Excel, CCMH began the search for a more sophisticated solution that would provide them with a streamlined budgeting process with greater accuracy and easy access for budget contributors.
Today, CCMH uses Planning Maestro for their annual budgeting and planning, with their fiscal year running from July to June – the team begins with their capital budget, then revenue budget and then their expenses. Once the annual budget has been completed and approved, they rely on Planning Maestro’s advanced reporting capabilities to create variance reports that are distributed to the patient care area directors so they can review their own budget vs. actuals and adjust if necessary.
Benefits
Intuitive Automation Accelerates Budgeting Cycle
When it came to building the annual budget in Excel, CCMH found that it was not only difficult to involve budget contributors, but there was also a lot of manual work and room for error. Planning Maestro offers intuitive automation out of the box and streamlines the collaboration process, enabling users to work together on the upcoming year’s budgeting process. According to Ms. Delaney, the solution does the ‘back-end work for you’ so you are ahead of the game and can easily build the next year’s budget and involve the necessary contributors.
Seamless Integration
Because Planning Maestro operates as an extension of the GL, pulling in actuals data, CCMH can monitor and analyze their budget vs. actuals whenever they need, something they weren’t able to do before. Planning Maestro seamlessly integrates with their GL, Dynamics GP, which has proved to be especially helpful. Before, each month they would do a trial balance upload which was quite time consuming. “Having the data automatically input from Dynamics GP into Planning Maestro and having everything in the right spot at the end, it’s been a nice upgrade for us,” said Ms. Delaney.
Ease of Use Fosters Collaboration & Accountability
Not only does the Finance team at CCMH find Planning Maestro easy to use but they also have strong support and ownership from the patient care area directors because they are able to contribute, review and maintain their individual department budget numbers and compare them to their actuals throughout the year, providing more accurate insight into financial health and performance.
“Because the solution is so easy to use, we have a lot of ownership from the directors. They can easily go in review and really own their own budget numbers,” said Ms. Delaney.
Ms. Delaney also noted that being able to easily view one piece of the budget at a time – whether it’s drilling into revenue or drivers or expenses – helps make it not so overwhelming to review, especially for non-finance users like the patient care directors.
“I have used other budgeting software in the past and Planning Maestro is one of the most user-friendly ones out there,” said Ms. Delaney.
