Client Profile
Founded in 1960, Saint Simeon’s is a nonprofit foundation and continuing care facility offering amenities including independent and assisted living, a healthcare center and a high-level memory center. A mission of the Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma, Saint Simeon’s manages approximately 165 employees across two separate organizations—the foundation and the home. With a complicated chart of accounts and ineffective reporting in Financial Edge, the financial team needed a simplified senior living technology solution in the cloud.
Business Challenge
When Thea Lawson took over as Saint Simeon’s Director of Finance, the organization had been using Financial Edge for more than a decade. The system had some serious limitations that were causing frustration for the finance team. Thea explained, “It definitely was not user friendly. We couldn’t drill down into our data or get the reports we needed from Financial Edge. It was very time-consuming.”
The chart of accounts was another big challenge for Thea and her team. “Over the years, the number of accounts and funds setup in our chart of accounts was astronomical. Everything had a separate account and if you printed it out, it was about 25 pages to sort through. We wanted to simplify things.”
Saint Simeon’s began the search for a cloud-based senior living technology solution and initially considered reimplementing Financial Edge, thinking it would be easier on the managers and staff. But the concerns over the software’s reporting capabilities and reliance on Excel made them realize they needed to evaluate other solutions.
As users of NetSmart, Thea attended one of their conferences where she met the Intellitec Solutions team and learned about Sage Intacct. “I hadn’t found a product I liked and was really impressed by what Intacct could do. As a smaller organization, I knew we didn’t need everything it had, but it had everything we needed.”
Technology Solution
Like most nonprofits, Saint Simeon’s first needed to justify the cost of implementing Sage Intacct. Once they did, they were ready to move quickly. They chose Intellitec to implement Sage Intacct based on their deep experience with long-term care (LTC) facilities and NetSmart. “I felt comfortable early on with Intellitec and our consultant. She understood what needed to be done and it was great to have one person to work with, but also know they have a lot of expertise and resources on the team backing us up,” says Thea.
Originally planning the project for the following year, the finance team decided a mid-year implementation would work better and wanted to get started right away. Intellitec’s consultant worked closely with Thea on using Intacct’s dimensions to simplify and streamline their complex chart of accounts. “At first, I had a hard time wrapping my head around dimensions and fixed assets in Intacct and how it would work, but our consultant was fabulous. She helped me through it and advised us on what other LTC facilities have done with very helpful recommendations on what we needed and didn’t need,“ says Thea.
Intellitec also worked with Thea setup several custom reports in Sage Intacct based on their needs, including a special “Fund Roll Forward” report. Ultimately, Intellitec had Intacct ready to go within a few months, meeting their deadline and budget. Saint Simeon’s successfully went live without a hitch.
“The whole implementation was very well-organized,” said Thea, “In fact, when we went live it was a bit surreal. We were looking at each other thinking ‘we’re live’ and just waited for something to go wrong. Nothing went wrong. Our consultant had us totally prepared and I couldn’t have done it without her. There were so many key aspects we would have missed.”
When asked if Saint Simeon’s would recommend Intellitec and Sage Intacct senior living technology solution for other long-term care facilities, Thea is quick to say, “I already have, actually. Even though we are probably one of the smaller users, it is a great system and works well for us. My advice is to plan well, do your homework and assignments and if you commit to doing that, even with limited staff, it can be a successful outcome. We are continuously working on improvements, but when my biggest complaint at the end of it all is the font size on our checks, I’d say that’s pretty good.”
Intellitec Impact
Simplified Journal Entries
In the old system, they couldn’t make a simple change to a journal entry or see corrected versions of entries. With Intacct, they can just go in and make necessary corrections while maintaining paper audit trails, which has resulted in a big savings of time and frustration.
Consolidated Chart of Accounts
Intellitec helped Saint Simeon’s use Intacct dimensions and fixed assets to substantially consolidate and streamline hundreds of accounts. Accounts and funds are more organized than ever and make sense. The 25-page printout of accounts has been reduced to 3 easy-to-read pages.
Drill Down Insight, Accelerated Review Process
It used to take up to a day and half to go through numerous departmental reports separately. Now, reports are pulled up quickly and it takes a couple of hours at most. Managers can use dashboards to see what they need at a glance and have one-click access to a variety of reports. Drilling down into information is a major benefit they were missing, giving them new real-time insight to make better financial decisions.
Cloud-based Convenience
In addition to more robust security and reliability that comes with their Intacct cloud solution, staff can work remotely from anywhere, at any time. All the information they need is at their fingertips without having to print out a hard copy. The ability to attach documents to more complicated journal entries means not having to be in the office hunting down paper files for backup documents.