BT Partners and Sage Intacct Provide a Next-Generation Solution for Tuscan Gardens Senior Living®
Industry
Senior Living
Solution
Sage Intacct
In Business
Since 2016
Customer
Since 2018
Tuscan Gardens Senior Living
Tuscan Gardens Management Corporation owns and operates three luxury senior living communities in Florida. The company’s award-winning facilities are warm and inviting, evoking home to their residents. They are also complex and expensive to build and operate. To gain the flexibility, visibility, and controls it needs to run the company profitably and compassionately, Tuscan Gardens relies on Sage Intacct and the technical expertise of BT Partners.
"Our partnership with BT Partners is beneficial on so many levels. They are always available with advice, direction, and fresh ideas. And technically, I’ve yet to meet anyone more astute."
Updating Aging Technology
“Our accounting grew much too complex for QuickBooks,” recalls Kevin Larrivee, Financial Analyst for Tuscan Gardens. “We upgraded to Sage Intacct, which is ideal for handling our complicated, multi-entity accounting structure. Our organization manages more than 60 separate entities, and Sage Intacct is designed for complex multi-entity management and intercompany transaction processing. BT Partners is the business partner we selected to implement Sage Intacct, and they’ve been an ideal partner for us.”
Larrivee notes that the senior living industry has not traditionally leveraged technology to the extent that many other industries have. “There hasn’t always been that focus on the entire operation,” he says. “Instead, each department uses the software they need, but there’s little visibility across functional areas. We wanted to change that at Tuscan Gardens, and BT Partners is helping us do that.”
Bringing Data Points Together
In addition to Sage Intacct, the company also uses ALIS from MedTelligent as its clinical management and billing software,a CRM application, and an outsourced payroll and time and attendance provider. “The best-in-breed approach fits the way we operate,” says Larrivee, “but we needed a way to bring all our data points together.” BT Partners suggested Domo, a powerful business intelligence (BI) platform that could provide the company with visibility into every aspect of its operations.
ALIS houses the company’s operations data (i.e., billing, clinical and resident data), while Sage Intacct holds financial information. With this tech stack, Tuscan Gardens can now bring an integrated view of this data to life. “BT Partners created dashboards in Domo that show us vacancy rates, market room rates compared to what we are currently charging, what floors in what facilities may need additional staffing level based on resident acuity, and much more,” says Larrivee.”
In addition to democratizing clinical and financial data, BT Partners delivers insight into the effectiveness of Tuscan Gardens’ marketing efforts. “We tag invoices in Sage Intacct with a campaign identifier from our CRM application,” explains Larrivee. “That allows us to track how many leads a campaign generated, the total cost of the campaign, and how much revenue it generated. Those answers require input from our CRM, our billing software, and Sage Intacct. BT Partners helped us bring all that data together. Advertising is a big expense of ours, so insight into how to do it better is extremely valuable.”
Increased Visibility Spawns Better Decision Making
Due to the upfront costs associated with building a brand-new Senior Living Community, Tuscan Gardens needs to obtain deep insight into its costs and billing strategies to reduce the time required to get them past debt service breakeven and into profitability. “Each of our applications holds a piece of the picture, and BT Partners pulls it together for us artfully in Domo. Essentially, if the data resides in one of our line-of-business applications, BT Partners can bring it to life,” says Larrivee. The dimensions feature of Intacct allows Tuscan Gardens to “tag” transactions with important financial and operations data, and easily “slice and dice” it into actionable business performance information.
Tuscan Gardens also now has deep visibility into vendors and is able to manage Accounts Payable with fewer resources. Sage Intacct gives easy insight into key vendors across all of their communities, which are separate entities. This streamlines the process for Tuscan Gardens and their vendors, providing cost savings for vendors doing work at all of Tuscan Gardens’ communities.
Five Days Saved on Financial Reporting
Tuscan Gardens is accountable to private investors for a portion of its funding and tax-exempt municipal bonds for the balance. It’s a complicated financing model, but Sage Intacct is designed to handle even complex accounting structures. “It breaks down the complexities, giving us insight into the operation and making it easy to provide our investors with dashboard views of the data they want to see,” says Larrivee.
Sage Intacct also speeds and simplifies the company’s monthly close. “Previously, generating our monthly financial package took five full days,” recalls Larrivee. “Now it takes us less than 15 minutes. That’s nearly a week worth of time and labor savings we can channel into other, more strategic activities.”
A Platform for Answers
Thanks to its new ability to tap into the whole of its business data, Tuscan Gardens can answer previously unanswerable questions. “Before, we managed by looking in the rearview mirror,” says Larrivee. “Now, our technology gives us time — time to impact meaningful change in the organization.”
He concludes, “Our partnership with BT Partners is beneficial on so many levels. They use their experience in our industry to connect us with other senior living managers to share strategies and successes. They are always available with advice, direction, and fresh ideas — and technically, I’ve yet to meet anyone more astute.”