Collaborative, detailed, error-free budgets made quickly & easily with Centage

Simplified budgeting leads to more accurate personnel planning

Established in 1984, Equitas Health is a regional nonprofit community healthcare system. With 21 offices in 13 cities, Equitas Health serves tens of thousands of patients in Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia each year, with services including primary and specialized medical care, pharmacy, dentistry, mental health and recovery, and other community health initiatives. Equitas Health also operates pharmacies in Ohio and Texas.

Before Centage, Equitas Health used Excel for their budgeting and planning. They would create the budget in Excel and then upload the templates into their accounting system, Abila, to run monthly reports. With more than 500 employees across 21 offices and 25 departments, the process was time-consuming, overly complex, and error-prone.

FP&A software solution for a large team with budget contributors across departments

“With Excel there was a lot of room for error, and it was hard to keep track of what revision you’re on and try to figure out what had changed… For a company our size, it was no longer feasible to continue to utilize Excel for our planning needs.” – Mareva Page, CFO

To compound the complexity, multiple operators (or department heads) within the organization create their own initial versions of departmental budgets. These budgets are submitted as separate spreadsheets to the finance team, who add them to the larger company budget.

Given the high number of departments and people that were working on individual budgets, version control was lost and errors were common. The consolidation process was time-intensive and cumbersome – added labor caused by manual error.

Faster, more accurate actuals vs. budget analysis

“We sat through the [Centage] demo and we were just blown away by the intuitive nature of it, especially when we thought about all of our operators being able to use it.”

After a thorough audit of FP&A software to replace their Excel-only method, Equitas Health found that their GL system, Abila, was sufficient for grant accounting and could handle all the necessary segments and coding at a very detailed level. This is critical for reporting back to the nonprofit’s funders.

What they lacked was the ability to forecast the strategic financial components of the business. Centage’s Planning Maestro addressed this precise lack. It operates as an extension of the GL, seamlessly integrated with their accounting software. This integration enables ongoing actuals vs. budget comparisons and accurate forecasts.

Now, Equitas Health can automatically run key financial reports and provide them to all operators across departments.

Fine-grained personnel planning

“Our operators and Finance alike are so excited to have the ability to see very quickly what was budgeted and then to have that detail feed into our financial reports – it’s extremely helpful – especially when it comes to our personnel planning.”

Planning Maestro’s spread methods let the Equitas Health finance team apply individual spreads depending on the specific employee. This was the first time they were able to budget down to the personnel level with such precise detail.

The ability to budget down to the individual health insurance or dental plan for more than 500 employees, and to have that detail readily available (and accurate), has been a game changer for Finance. Now departmental operators can run financial reports themselves whenever they need to using Planning Maestro.

One centralized place for departments to collaborate on the budget

“Just the fact that we will be able to do this in Planning Maestro is amazing, we don’t have to worry about anyone being in the accounting software. They will be able to get the information they need on their own to run and adjust within their departments on a regular basis, a huge thing for us.” — Angela McKinney, Controller

Equitas Health has moved beyond Excel and is now able to build a collaborative, error-free budget quickly and easily with more detail than ever before for personnel planning.

The finance team and budget operators are able to perform critical budget vs. actuals analysis without losing time or data across multiple versions of multiple budgets.

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