face tight margins and a need to manage an incredible amount of detail in order to remain profitable. In an industry that budgets by both department and per resident, balancing financial responsibility and providing excellent care for residents, a strong accounting solution that can keep up with real-time budget vs actual demands is critical.
Budget vs Actual in Real Time
The ability to record your budgets by bed or in total and compare both to actuals is important to managing your communities. Add in the ability to see current financials at any time, and put that into a web portal that Executive Directors can view on demand, and you’ve covered this critical need.
Track Resident Counts
Assisted living organizations need to see more than just total amounts. See costs broken down to per resident figures is important – which means your accounting system needs to allow for tracking non-financial data and using that information in financial reporting. This allows you to take those per bed budgets and extrapolate them based on current residency counts, or take actuals divided by residency counts and see per bed costs.
Integrate with Clinical
Many facilities use separate programs to manage clinical documents and their accounting products. The “must have” here is a solution that integrates both of these worlds because running a long-term care facility you do not want to compromise and not have the ability to be as efficient as possible with time moving so fast in such a competitive field. Strong integration between your clinical software – which often handles billing – and your accounting system – will keep your data up to date and remove errors from re-keying information, as well as save you time.
Payroll Integration
Being that labor is a large cost in long-term care facilities you are going to want to make sure that you have a payroll solution that integrates to your accounting system, or at least provides a GL import file. When it comes to accounting “must haves” the easier your company can make this process so you can free up time to focus elsewhere, like providing top notch care for the loved ones in your facilities is key.
