Kindred at Home

As one of the largest home care providers in the U.S., Kindred at Home had built up a complex budget planning and reporting process thanks to numerous acquisitions and hundreds of locations spread throughout the country. The healthcare provider faced a dire diagnosis: Its budget managers were the same nurses responsible for providing care. “Most of our locations are led by nurses. Their favorite subject in school was not finance, so they’re already not real crazy about the budgeting process,” says Aimee McCorkle, vice president, business operations, at Kindred at Home. In addition, constant changes to Medicare reimbursements and regular organizational hierarchy restructuring due to acquisitions, consolidations, and new locations were difficult to manage in Excel or the previous on-premises planning software.

The prescription? The Next FPA Business Planning Cloud. With Next FPA , the Kindred at Home finance team was able to simplify the process for the nurse budget managers, which in turn improved company visibility into the budget and increased its flexibility, not to mention freeing up nurse time to deliver better care. “Next FPA has allowed us to decrease our budget planning process time from approximately five months down to three months,” says McCorkle. “With that shortened time, the finance team has more time to spend with operations and sales to help drive our business initiatives. We can actually do more return on investment planning or modeling on startups. We even get involved with acquisitions, when before we were spending half the year on the budget planning process.

Challenges

Experienced version control issues and difficulty getting nurse end users to complete budgets in a timely manner using the previous Excel and Oracle Hyperion-based on-premises software Couldn’t incorporate changes made at a branch level until the following day, because an administrator was required to run a business rule to calculate consolidated

snapshots

Struggled to adapt the model to incorporate regular changes in regulations, Medicare reimbursement rules, and business structure Suffered through a lengthy budget planning process, which kept finance from being able to collaborate with operations and sales on business planning Results Deployed Next FPA throughout the company in just three months to 500 users, with the intuitive software leading to greater buy-in than the previous process Increased ability to have the nurse budget managers input budget data directly while empowering them to create forecasts specific to local markets Increased flexibility in the model to handle major changes, such as Medicare reimbursement modifications or organizational shifts Freed up two months of finance time for strategic tasks like investment planning and acquisitions.