Healthcare Accounting Trends | Leveraging Sage Intacct to Support Your Team

And Karen Penhallegon is a senior manager with EisnerAmper Advisory Group bringing 15 years of experience helping organizations develop and improve technology processes along various industries including healthcare, construction, hospitality, non-profits, and more. Karen's knowledge lies in Sage Intacct where she assists organizations to transitioning, optimizing and supporting this platform.

I'm excited to have both Karen and Amy to share their insights today. And let's dive a little bit deeper in today's agenda. So, we wanted to share the top five trends in accounting that Amy has seen, as well as share a demo of Sage Intacct to show how these trends are affecting accounting workflows. And then like I said, we're taking questions throughout, but we also have some time at the end if we don't get to them. All right, Amy, take it away.

Amy Jongerius:Thank you so much, Emily. We are so excited to be here today to talk about the trends and accounting that we want to educate you about. The first one that we want to tackle with you is moving to modern technology for financial management systems. So, consider the agility required for your practice to respond swiftly to your patient needs, given the evolving healthcare landscape and the technological goal advancements that have drastically changed your patient interaction and service delivery over time.

Now, apply this evolution to your financial management systems. Are your financial management systems keeping pace with the change in your practice that you're experiencing, or are you still using outdated systems where financial data is stored locally, and user access is limited as to who can be in your GL system all at one time?

Given the changes in your practice and the increasing demand for comprehensive data reporting, there's a growing necessity for modern, open and adaptable financial management systems. For example, cloud-based systems offer crucial benefits such as enhanced security and accessibility, essential for adapting to rapid market shifts. They reduce reliance and internal IT resources by outsourcing upgrades and ensuring systems are operational, and then those are all dependent on the vendor.

Moving to cloud also facilitates paperless document storage and quick access to historical records like invoices, drill entries, and improving audit response times. Overall, embracing modern technology and financial management not only enhances operational efficiency, but also strengthens your ability to meet evolving healthcare demands effectively. And with that, I'm going to hand it to Karen to talk about the finance leadership and culture of customer success.

Karen Penhallegon:Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'm going to tell you a little bit about Sage Intacct. So, we're going to be talking about Sage Intacct throughout this presentation in ways that it can help you better manage your organization. But the first question most people ask is, what is Sage Intacct? And so, as Amy alluded to, it's a cloud-based financial management solution. It's really designed for everyone. If you're a startup, if you're a bid market, a customer, or if you are even up to enterprise level, it can scale all the way through all of those different levels of organizations.

Some of the key things that really drew us to Sage Intacct when we were looking for a solution that we wanted to start implementing for our clients, number one was that it is the only preferred solution of the AICPA. So, that's been the case for about 10 years now that the AICPA has given Intacct and Intacct alone that classification.

But really more important to our clients and to us is the fact that it is rated number one in customer satisfaction year-over-year. So, for the past five or six years, G2 has ranked Sage Intacct number one in customer satisfaction, and TrustRadius has also given them very high reviews. These are both great sites if you're looking to research and learn about any type of software. They allow real end users to go out and do reviews and comments on the actual software itself so you can really get non-biased opinions on the software that you're looking at.

So, that's one piece of the puzzle that we were looking at with Sage Intacct. The other piece is really Sage's culture. So, they have very much a culture of customer success. It starts with their industry leading SLA, which they call the Buy with Confidence guarantee. That's going to really put a lot of protections around you as the customer and making sure that you have that access you need to your cloud software.

But on top of that, Sage also has a culture of just keeping their customers for life. So, it's a lot of customer-friendly practices. And then finally, having those built-in best practices for security, things like dual authentication, requiring additional logins, very detailed and granular role access to the system all are part of what made Sage Intacct really perfect for us whenever we're going out to recommend solutions to clients. So, now I'll hand things back to Amy for the next trend.

Amy Jongerius:Thanks Karen. So, the next trend, we want to talk about needs for systems to integrate. And maybe this image really reflects maybe your current financial management systems, meaning that there's a lot of manual entry that's going in from your payroll system to your GL system, to your payables and your banking. I mean, maybe there's a lot of manual exercises that are going on.

And so, basically, really educating the technology and automation are a really positive thing to look at that there are new systems in place that can help integrate all of these systems together to make it so much more beneficial for you as a financial leader of your practice. Oops. There we go. There we go. Leverage and automation of the slides.

But with modern financial systems, they seamlessly integrate with various other systems and data sources. So, for example, general ledger detail is coming, is Sage Intacct, this allows us to integrate a number of different opportunities of banking, payroll, payables, and EMR into your GL, into your general ledger. So, again, with modern technology, you can streamline a number of your systems to integrate and to really speak to one another so that you're reducing the manual data entry that you are navigating on a daily basis. And so, Karen, I'm going to hand it to you to talk about how Sage Intacct can help minimize the manual data entry portion.

Karen Penhallegon:All right. Excellent. So, the next piece of the what is Sage Intacct question that we'll usually get is, what does it mean that it's cloud-based? So, of course, cloud is a big buzzword for a few years. If you're not familiar with what that means, it means that the software itself is maintained entirely by the vendor. They're going to maintain the servers that it sits on, and you're going to access that software usually just through a web browser and an internet connection.

The other piece about Sage Intacct that really makes it unique and makes it fit really well with this trend about integrating your solutions is that they're designed to be a best-in-class solution. And what that really means best-in-class is that they're going to focus on doing what they are best at, which is Sage Intacct is those core pieces that are core to your accounting and finance team. So, things that are related to your accounting and ERP, maybe that's purchasing or general ledger, analytics surrounding that data, things like payroll.

All of that are things that can be gained within the Sage Intacct hemisphere. But then the best-in-class piece means that they're going to connect out to other industry leading solutions. So, if you are using a CRM like Salesforce, maybe you have a payroll solution like ADP, something like a bill.com or Expensify for expenses are very importantly in healthcare world, your EMR, all of those are solutions that can be connected into Sage Intacct in a number of different ways, just depending on how those solutions work.

What we love about Sage Intacct is it has a completely OpenAPI. And what that means is that an API is just the way that two programs can talk to each other. So, OpenAPIs mean that other solutions that have an API can connect into Intacct and data can move back and forth seamlessly. So, that's the case for a lot of these solutions you see here on the left and many others that are out there in the market. They all have pre-built solutions that can integrate into Sage Intacct.

But even if your solution does not, we can often do integrations through just what we would call data feeds, so import, export. If there's a solution out there that cannot be integrated automatically, we can still get you as automated as possible and remove that manual data entry that's given you the risk of error whenever somebody is having to type things in multiple places and multiple times.

And one of the best examples of the utilizing that OpenAPI is Sage Intacct's EMRConnect. So, this is a solution Sage has had out for a couple of years now. It gives us the ability to connect in one or more EMRs directly into Sage Intacct. And so, our team, our Sage's team, can work with you to determine exactly what pieces of your EMR you'd like to integrate over, whether it's things like, of course, your revenue, potentially, but it might also be financial and clinical or statistical data. So, we'll see some examples of this during the demo in a few minutes.

But things like the number of patients that you might see on a given day type of visits, different things like that that are maybe not traditionally stored in your GL can be handled in Sage Intacct and can be integrated directly through this EMRConnect. A few of the things that I think are really important about this solution is that it supports multi-entity. Sage Intacct is inherently multi-entity. So, maybe those of you out there who are in things like QuickBooks or Sage 50 or Peachtree, you have a lot of different company files that you're having to switch back and forth between.

Intacct doesn't have that. All the entities live together in a single environment. So, this also supports that multi-entity and it supports multiple EMR data sources. So, if you have different ... Maybe you've acquired different companies or you have different lines of business that have different EMRs for that particular specialty, we can integrate to all of those different ones and still bring all your data into one central location for reporting. So, that's one example of an integration that we see most of our healthcare clients using. All right. Amy, back to you for our next trend.

Amy Jongerius:Awesome. Thanks, Karen. So, the next trend is really talking about secured systems prevent cyberattacks and HIPAA violation fines. Obviously, being in the healthcare space, HIPAA compliance is really important, making sure that we're protecting all of our patients' information. And as we've seen over the years, there's been a number of data breaches or HIPAA penalties. And so, I think just talking today about the importance of protecting that information is really crucial.

And I think the biggest piece, too, is when looking at protecting health information, it's crucial to recognize its presence not just within the healthcare systems, but it's also within the financial management systems that you have. A significant number of healthcare organizations underestimate the extent to which PHI is stored in these systems. As highlighted by some examples, I'm going to share with you for some recent research that we've made aware of.

In recent years, cybersecurity threats in healthcare have surged dramatically. A report from the US Department of Health and Human Services revealed that 34% of US healthcare providers experienced ransomware attacks in the first half of 2021. Yes. I know the stat's a little dated, but I think that it's still relevant. And this resulted in payments tolling 1.27 million to recover the data.

And so, remarkably, healthcare data holds a value on the black market that is 10 times higher than financial data, further emphasizing its attractiveness to cyber criminals. In addition, HIPAA violations pose a substantial financial risk to healthcare providers. Again, in 2020, providers paid over $13 million in fines for HIPAA violations. And so, again, I think we're just wanting to point out that it's really important to be mindful of what information is going in your financial management system if it's either in Sage 50, QuickBooks Online or Xero. I mean, it's just being mindful of what that information looks like.

So, ensuring patient data protection is really crucial. And also, keeping in mind that if you are working with or engaging with consultants or third-party vendors who have access to your PHI on behalf of your practice, compliance with HIPAA rules are generally required by having a business associate agreement signed between you as the covered entity and the individuals you're consulting with or leveraging as a third-party.

And so, please keep in mind if you do not have this agreement in place, I highly recommend navigating to the HHS website. They do have a sample template of a BAA agreement so that you can review that, make sure that it aligns with the business situation that you have in place with the consultant, but making sure that you are protected as a covered entity and making sure that those who have access to your PHI are protecting that information as well.

And so, again, another stat that we want to share, just again that healthcare is one of the top five sectors of cost when it comes to cybersecurity breaches. So, again, at the end of the day, I think it's just being mindful of how are you protecting that information and what information is going into your financial management system to make sure that it's not giving too much information about the patients that you're serving on a daily basis.

And so, Karen, I'm going to hand it to you to talk about how Sage Intacct obviously can help with that component.

Karen Penhallegon:Absolutely. Yeah. It's really critical for everyone, not just in healthcare to have that security, but there's an extra level that's really needed if you work in the healthcare industry. Starting with just the general security of Sage Intacct, as I mentioned before, they follow all those standard best practices in the industry.

A lot of people are worried about saying if they're going to put their data in the cloud, isn't it more vulnerable there? And the truth is actually no, because if you think about it, Sage Intacct in any cloud solution, they are devoting a lot more time and energy than you ever could to making sure that data is secure.

So, if you have things on a local server there within your organization, you're having to do other things, other operational parts of your business, you're not focusing all day on making sure that data is secure. That's one of the biggest things that any cloud business is doing is ... That question a lot. I always ask the question, "Do you have an PII in your accounting system?" And most people will say, "Well, no, absolutely not." And then I said, "Well, how do you process refunds?"

And usually, a light bulb goes off of, "Yeah. We're sending refund checks out of our accounting system." That is PII. So, there's a lot of risk out there that people don't even realize that they are having violations if they're not protecting that data. Sage Intacct has been HIPAA-compliant for decades. It's been HIPAA-compliant for many, many years. They're HIPAA and high-tech compliant certified by Avertium, which you may have known as Sword & Shield in the past. They will sign a BAA with you as well, so you don't have to worry about not having that business associate agreement that Amy mentioned.

And then they also have peer reviewed by HFMA. So, all of that is just going to show you they are really, really protecting your data because they value it as much or even more than you do and making sure that it's protected from anybody out there who may want to do something nefarious with your data. So, all right, Amy, back to you.

Amy Jongerius:Great. So, of course, as we talk about financial management systems, we're going to talk about again, how to improve the financial transparency and just simplify reporting as in general. I mean the easiest way that we can get data from ourselves as financial leaders into the physicians' and owners' hands, the better. And so, one of the nice things that comes with a more modern financial system is KPI dashboards.

I know a lot of us have probably created something from scratch in Excel, but really to be successful in your role, like having those KPIs be available at the click of a button is super beneficial for you as a leader to understand the value of your organization. So, imagine a dashboard where you can see cost or revenue per treatment or per patient or per CPT code or location. Modern tech financial management systems can hold the statistical information and use that data in conjunction to really provide you with those ready-made reports or dashboards.

And in addition, think about how great it would be if every physician, yes, if you gave them access, maybe a limited access to your financial management system, but that they could log in and see a real-time dashboard of their department or specialty and see a profit and loss statement, allowing them to make real-time decisions on how to navigate that specific department P&L. So, having those real-time dashboards that you're not having to do manually but yet leverage technology and the information's already in your general ledger to produce that dashboard makes it a real-time conversation with that physician to let them understand where their practice is at and how are things going.

Secondly, customizable reporting templates. And most of the single-ended systems that you might be living in, so like a QuickBooks Online or a Sage 50, I mean, they're probably only giving you very standard reporting packages. So, reporting packages are probably just your balance sheet, P&Ls and standard AR, aging reports, and similar basic reports.

But really at the end of the day, you want to be generating reports. You can look at revenue costs, again, by location or specialty. And in modern financial accounting systems, you have the ability to customize these reports and have them populate for you whenever you choose and for the time period in which you need them. And so, the nice part is that, again, in modern financial accounting systems, you have the option to customize as many reports as you need to make those decisions as possible.

And as your organization grows, you need to have an accounting system that can grow with you. Having a platform like Sage Intacct allows you to provide a scalable architecture of your chart of accounts. For example, if you decide to add a new entity or add a new location or add a subspecialty, having an accounting system that can scale with you and grow is very meaningful when you are the one generating their financial reports on a monthly basis and have to pull data from a number of different places to make that accounting report and those financial statements meaningful at the end of every month.

As Karen talked about already, multi-entity consolidation. I mean as mergers and acquisitions surge to record levels and as financial leaders, we face a crucial need to streamline the presentation of consolidated financials. Many organizations, again, are using outdated single-entity systems which struggle to keep up with pace of organizational expansion. And so, if you are familiar with these single-entity systems and you do have multi-entities, you know that you're managing several sets of books for each entity and spending time posting intercompany entries in each set of those books.

And at the same time, you have to take the time to export the statements from each single-entity's piece of software and perform a consolidation in Excel. So, by adopting to a more modern financial management system designed for multi-entity environments, this can easily reduce your burden and your headache on a monthly basis. These systems enable seamless push button consolidations and rapid aggregation of transactions across multiple entities, locations and clinics, and obviously it helps you from a multi-entity consolidation perspective.

So, again, I would highly suggest looking at a more modern accounting system to help you with this space, because I know that it'll definitely reduce the time that it takes to produce financial statements at a consolidated basis every month for you. So, of course, Karen, I'm going to hand it over to you to tell us how does Sage Intacct help us with these items?

Karen Penhallegon:Absolutely. So, we're going to see a demo in just a few minutes to give you just a little preview of some of the ways that we can handle the different you might have. In preparation for that though, I like to give a little bit of a preview just into how Sage Intacct works and what makes it different than those single-entity or other maybe older Legacy solutions out there.

We have four pillars here. I'm just going to spend a couple of minutes here and then we're going to look at some examples as well as some other reporting dimensions in just a moment. But I'd like to start out talking about the chart of accounts because it's something that as financial professionals, we're all probably very familiar with charts of accounts. But if you're in one of these older Legacy systems, you might have a very large or complex chart of accounts, because you're probably trying to build a lot of your reporting into that chart of accounts or potentially if you're in a QuickBooks solution, maybe into your single class dimension that you have.

So, this can result in a very segmented chart of accounts. You're repeating information in the chart of accounts because maybe you're trying to get departments, positions, locations, all of that into your chart. Intacct is going to take all of that away because we're going to report on that in a different way. Instead, we're going to make your chart of accounts really lean and clean. So, we're going to trim it down to just the main accounts and those natural classifications that you meet.

The next thing I want to speak to here is going to be the ability to have multiple books. So, of course, any financial solution has at least one book. It's usually maybe an accrual book. But Intacct has the ability to have as many different books as you might like. So, out-of-the-box, you can use an accrual book, a gap book, a tax book, cash book. You can also create as many different user defined books as you might need.

So, if there's any need for you to look at your financials maybe in a slightly different way, a lot of times I'll hear about people who are doing adjusting entries directly back into their ... do an Excel spreadsheet and not actually putting them into the financial management solution. Instead, we can actually have that in a book and then we can flexibly choose whether to include those books into your financial reporting.

Sorry if I'm having some connection issues, it sounds like. But please jump in and fill in if you need to, anyone whenever I go out. Last couple of things here is going to be the ability to have those multiple entities. So not only is it great for the consolidation purposes that we'll see in just a minute, it also allows us to do auto-balancing entries. So, we're going to be able to create due to and do from entries automatically for you. So, all of those manual entries that you're probably doing today back and forth between multiple companies, I'll show you how that can be a lot simpler if you live in an environment where everything is in a single solution.

Last but definitely not least is Intacct's superpower and that's dimensions. And so, dimensions are those other things that you're trying to report on that you may are trying to cram into your chart of accounts or get from somewhere else. It could be things like we said a minute ago, the location, the department, maybe it's your physician or care staff. I'm going to show you some examples of those in just a minute.

But Intacct is essentially going to take those and separate them out into their own fields. And so, what I like to think of it as living in a world of accounting, I love Excel. If you think about your GL as an Excel document, we're really turning it into a giant pivot table. So rather than us trying to parse things out of one or two fields, now we're going to have maybe eight or nine different fields that we can use to slice and dice our data.

For some examples of those, on our next slide here, this is just some of the dimensions that we often see with healthcare organizations. So, things like your entity, of course, is a dimension. Maybe you have different locations within those entities. Departments are very common. We can often use things like class or item, like Amy had mentioned, to track many different types of services that are being provided. And then a big one that we see a lot is going to be tracking physicians. So, that's a very common one we see whether it's for comp purposes and they're getting comp on different things and based on their performance or just to track how a physician is performing.

Also, for those of you out there who may be non-profit healthcare organizations, Intacct is fantastic at tracking grants. So, healthcare and not-for-profit are two of their largest verticals. So, if you're in both of those, you're going to be in a great place with Sage Intacct. Not-for-profit is the largest, so they're fantastic at doing grant tracking. So, if you're having to do a lot of grant cost tracking and maybe you're doing reimbursement invoices, we can definitely help with that as well.

So, I'm going to show you all this in a few minutes in the demo, but before that, we have one last trend for Amy to talk about. So, I'll pass it back to her.

Amy Jongerius:Great. Thanks, Karen. Automation is obviously a big component of our conversation today. And as I want you all as financial leaders of your practice, again, it's just take a minute to think about your practice and this may give you the time to actually think about improvements that you even want to see in your own month-end process or this financial management systems. So, giving you the space to do that right now.

So, take a moment to reflect on your month-end process. I bet you can identify several tasks that involve manual or repetitive entry or think a bit broader. When was the last time you asked your team what are some pain points they experienced when completing their accounting responsibilities or what tasks would they automate if given the opportunity?

Often these pain points can be alleviated through automation. This can involve leveraging a general entry upload template for multi-line drill entries. So, instead of manually entering a hundred lines, they can leverage an Excel upload or establishing recurring drill entry templates so they don't have to again manually record a depreciation drill entry every month. Again, leveraging the automation that's within your accounting system to help you reduce how much manual entry needs to happen.

And again, integrating technology with your general address system can automate data synchronization, as Karen talked about before, and eliminating the need for manual coding, just overall data entry. Another example is if your accounts payable team manually enters vendor invoices in the GL system. Consider exploring a more in-depth AP module or software that could help eliminate the retention of paper invoices and that manual entry. And if not, there are a number of reputable accounts payable and bill pay software vendors in the market that integrate with most and if not all GL accounting platforms.

So, just by reviewing and optimizing your processes to eliminate manual or repetitive entry, you not only enhance efficiency but also empower your team to focus on more strategic initiatives that drive growth for your practice. And as we all know, staffing constraints. We know that the market is hard for finding great employees and accounting individuals that come be part of your team. So, again, depending on the size of your practice, your business office may consist of only a few individuals who wear a number of hats on top of just navigating their daily, weekly, or monthly accounting responsibilities.

And so, by automating specific tasks, you can relieve your staff from feeling constrained and find them capacity in their schedule to work on projects or other tasks that require their attention and really the skill set that they have. As we all want to do, condense our month-end close timeline. We all are always asked, "Can we close the month-end process in two more days? Can we cut two days off our month-end process?"

Again, finding ways to reduce a manual task and leveraging tools to make the process more efficient can help you navigate finding a better way to do your month-end close and finding some efficiencies and hopefully can alleviate you from a 10-day close down to an 8-day close. And again, obviously, depending on your process that you have, it's worth looking at and just understanding if there's something that we can do to make that easier and really less timely or time-consuming so we can really turn those financials around to our physicians and our owners in a more timely basis.

Automation also helps reduce errors and obviously, as I mentioned, increase efficiency. Finding automation and workflows allows you to streamline processes to save your time and reduce those errors by really just helping to standardize financial reporting as a whole. Accounting sector can automate that data entry and reconciliation and really allow you to, again, repurpose your time to work on something else instead of spending time like manually hunting and pecking for why that account can't reconcile.

Again, having all that data automated and fed from your banking account to your GL system can help you navigate those reconciliations and just save you some time. Demand for real-time insights, as well. I mean, we're all asked for on a real-time basis as to what's the status of our practice and where are we at? And so, really, it's a matter of finding a way to identify that real-time information from an operational and a clinical data perspective.

And at times, pulling that information from either your EMR or EHR or from your GL system can be very time-consuming. And modern systems now empower leaders the agility to swiftly pull that information and be able to monitor the business and activities in a real-time and effortless reporting capabilities. And so, again, finding time to pull the data together in a more timely basis can help you really understand where your practice is at.

And so, again, in summary, automating tasks through a modern financial management system grants you as a leader access to more real-time insights. And these insights enable a deeper understanding of how operational changes may impact your practice and facilitating more informed decision making and strategic planning with your physicians and your owners of your practice. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Karen again for a demo.

Karen Penhallegon:All right. So now I'm going to show you in-practice in real life how some of these different trends can be placed into your financial management solutions. So, let me get my screen share turned on here, give me just a second. And I'm going to ask one of my presenters to confirm that you guys can see my screen.

Amy Jongerius:Yes, we can.

Karen Penhallegon:Wonderful. Thank you.

Amy Jongerius:Looks good, Karen.

Karen Penhallegon:Excellent. So, what I'm going to talk through today, I'm going to start out just with a little bit of a high level, a review of Intacct dashboards and reporting and then we're going to talk about some of those specific month-end or other processes that you might have going on that we can make a little better through automation.

So, starting out with just ... This is Sage Intacct. This is the dashboard here. I'm going to be logged in today through Google Chrome. That's my preferred browser. All you need to get to Intacct is going to be a browser and an internet connection. As long as you have any modern browser, you'll be able to access it. I just like Chrome. A couple of things that are nice about having your solution right in a browser, all that browser functionality that you're used to using every day is right here available to you. So, whether you want to duplicate your tabs, you can have tabs on different screens, move the tabs around. All those things you might like to do anyway in your browser can all apply right here in Sage Intacct.

A couple other things that you'll see here, I'm move down the screen a little bit into Intacct itself. I'm in my demo company here called Goodway Health and I'm going to be logged in today as Emma. So, she is the CFO of this organization, she's the administrative user in this case. But keep in mind, like I mentioned before, we can get down to a very granular level of security. So, if you're used to maybe QuickBooks or another solution that doesn't have that ability, we can grant a lot more people access to this solution. For example, your doctors or physicians like Amy mentioned, because we're able to limit exactly what they can and can't see and what they can do in the solution.

So, even down to can they have an AP bill, can they just view AP bills or can they not see them at all? So, we can get down to very detailed level on that role security. We also can have multiple entities, like we mentioned before. You can see here I'm currently at the top level. What that means is that the top level, it's not a place where you post transactions, but it has access to all of the entities that you're going to have transactions in.

So, from here, I can access any entity to report on it or to transact in it. You could also work down add an entity level as well, but generally we'll stay at the top level and I will in this demo because that's where you can really see and do everything in the solution. For navigation purposes, today, you'll see a couple of different ways to navigate around. There is a full of course applications menu that you see here. So, this is the biggest way to navigate through the solution, but I'm also today going to use bookmarks that I've ... Gone ahead and bookmarked. This is the shortcuts are just like you bookmark a page in your browser. It's a way to easily shortcut directly to the page that you want to go to and they're also customizable.

So, that's what learners like to use these is ... each user gets to have their own bookmark list. They can rename them as you just saw, rearrange them and use that list however they need to do their individual jobs. So, it's very specialized to each person.

I'm going to go ahead and use my bookmark to hop out to one example of dimensions that we're going to see today. I wanted to use this one as an example of how Intacct's hierarchy works and how entities and locations interact in the solution. So, we're going to be working with a few of these today as we go through some of our reporting examples. This is the entity and location dimension. And you can see here I've got a natural hierarchy relationship built in here. And so, these orange dots are my entities. I happen to have three set up in this example. And then I can have locations under those. You can see the little green dots are locations that live underneath the entities.

The really nice thing about this is that all this information is going to automatically roll up to the top level of this hierarchy. So, whenever I look at a minute, the report that you're going to see back on the dashboard, if I look at something for Goodway Clinics, I'm going to see all the data that has been posted to any of these individual locations, but I can also drill down and look at a specific location as well.

So, it really is designed to give you maximum flexibility. This works throughout all the different dimensions. So, if you have departments that are structured this way or other dimensions that you want to arrange this way, we can do that. You can also have more than one layer of hierarchy. You can go out really as far as you want. I've seen it go out to six before layers of hierarchy and those roll-ups still work throughout all those layers.

All right. Let's go ahead and head back to our dashboard and let's talk about some of these reports that you're seeing on here in different ways that we can use dashboards. So, you can have as many different dashboards as you might want in a solution like Intacct. So, you can see here this is just one example of a dashboard. I call it my executive dashboard that we're going to use today. It's got some higher-level information. But you can have as many different dashboards as you might want.

You may have seen from my dashboards list here I have a whole bunch pre-built where those dashboards are based on the person who's performing the work. Maybe you have an AP dashboard or a purchasing dashboard or it's for physicians because they need to log in and see the performance of their practice or it's specific to a department. Whatever the case may be, we can build out those dashboards.

Dashboards can also be filtered. So, you notice I have my dashboard filtered back, backdated here just because my date is a little old in this demo company. Normally, this would default to as of today, but you can date this however you'd like. We can also have up to three different filters for dimensions. So, you can see here that I've got, on this particular dashboard, a department's filter and here's example of some of my departments that I have available.

You could also have ... In this case, I have an entity or location filter and I'm filtering just to operating entities right now. This is a great example of how you can create groups. So, if I needed to filter out specific types of entities or locations, I can create groups of them to report them all together or I can go down and look at a single entity. So, let's go look at just my entity 100 here, the clinics entity.

When I click apply, a whole dashboard is now going to update. And so, everything on here is now going to change to just show information only for this particular clinic. So, you can even see down here my profit and loss by location is now showing each of those three locations I saw previously and the roll-up into the top-level entity for those locations.

So, just a quick example of filters, let's go back to seeing all of our entities there. Now, Amy mentioned KPIs earlier and these performance cards you see across the top of the dashboard are a great way to report on KPIs. You can see here I've got combination. It can be financial data like revenue or it could be what we call statistical or clinical data. In this case, I'm looking at maybe number of treatments or it could be number of visits, whatever different data you might want to track. And then we can combine those.

So, if I do a combination, I might get things like revenue per treatment, if I'm looking at visits, things like what is my different types of costs per visit. So, this is all different types of information that I can pull. Right here on my dashboard and have it constantly updated in real-time. They can also be for different periods of time. For example, I have revenue set to year to date, but maybe I'm looking at monthly information, maybe it's weekly, it could be a quarter. Any of those standard periods that you can think of that you might want to look at even down to a day-to-day comparison.

I can also do comparisons to budget. So, you'll see here these visual indicators are doing a comparison either to a budget. So, in the case of revenue, I'm a little bit under budget. But in the case of treatments, I'm above my budget. Sorry above the prior month here. So, I'm looking at the different months, current versus prior.

All that is built into this one piece of data. Now, well, I think of this as more than just a number. So, I just see this number of revenue. It may not mean a lot to me, but now I know exactly how I'm doing versus the budget with one image right here. So, I think it's a really powerful tool to get you out of having to dig to get the information and just give you the information right there on your dashboard.

One other thing you might notice is these are drillable. So, I can actually drill down into information that's on the dashboard here. One example is revenue. I can click on that revenue number and I could see here it's going to pull out the individual accounts that make that up. So, I happen to have four revenue accounts set up. This is the budget that it's comparing them to and here's the actual.

And then I can continue drilling down if I want and even see more information. So, if I wanted to drill down maybe into this one, I would actually get the general ledger detail report of every entry that made up this number, which in this case it's a year-to-date number. So, it's quite a few entries, or making up the revenue numbers here. We'll do some more drill-downs in just a minute and show you some more about how that works.

I've got a couple more different types of dashboard components I want to talk about. One of them is going to be financial reports. I'm going to skip that for now though and jump down to this other example, which is going to be charts and graphs. So, we can also create financial charts and graphs using this financial data or the statistical data. So, you see here, for example, this is my visits. I can do all sorts of different normal graphs that you would expect, pie charts, donut charts, bar and column charts.

You can see here that I'm actually in this case doing a trend of a column chart looking at new visits versus existing patient visits and the totals. So, not only am I getting information a little more detailed into the different type of visits, I'm also seeing a trend over time. I can also see the data that's behind this or even drill into it if I wanted to click. It might be a little small ... visual columns or I can click the show data button to actually see the numbers that are behind it just with the one click of a button. Then I can click back to see my graph again.

So, this is great for all sorts of information. This is just one quick example of one of the charts that you can build here in the solution. All right. Moving on to financial reports. I've got a couple of different examples of financial reports on here because I think these are probably the most important thing that we can get out of financial system, of course. But I've got some different ways that we're using dimensions in these reports.

This top report here is one of my favorites. This is an actual budget report and it is by department. So, what you're seeing here is across my columns through my different departments that I have set up and then I rolled up total of all departments. And then underneath each department I have actual versus budget and a variance. You can budget at any of the dimensions along with GL accounts.

So, if you budget by doctor, if you budget by location, if you budget by department, all of those are not a problem. We can budget by any of them or any combination of them as well. And you can have actually a limited number of budgets. So, if you're wanting to do a budget, then maybe you pre-forecast, maybe you do three or four budgets a year, not a problem. We can do all of those and compare them all within the reporting tools.

We can also do conditional formatting. So, another thing here about ... Let's draw our attention to things that need our action versus you having to dig through and try to figure out on all these numbers, what do you need to look at. Instead, I've got conditional formatting set that's telling me if my budget numbers are over a certain amount, either greater than five or between zero and five, then it's highlighting them yellow or red for me. So, that way, I'm very able to very easily drill in immediately and say, "Okay. Look, I've got some very big variances in some of these areas." It's drawing my eyes straight to that and I can drill down right into the actual numbers from here to go see what's going on in those areas.

Another great example, and these are really standard out of the box reports that have just been tweaked a little bit. This one is the profit and loss by location report. This is one of my favorites because it is so flexible and it's a great example of the multi-entity consolidation. So, you can see here I've got my three entities as columns, and then right here I've got a total of all my locations real-time, up-to-date, and I also have a little spark line built in. That's my year trend so I can actually see how things are trending over the year and look for outliers all right on this report on my dashboard.

Actually, we're going to drill into this report a little bit, checking my time here, make sure I have time to do this. But I want to drill in and show you an example of a transaction that you can get all the way from the dashboard all the way into a transaction. So, looking at this report here, you can actually see there's more detail behind this summary level report. If I click on one of the arrows, I'm going to actually see the detail behind these totals. So, here's all the individual GL accounts that make up that total.

I can even continue drilling. So, maybe I want to drill into the clinic's number for office supplies because I see a spike here at the end of the year. I can drill into this. I'm going to get all the details behind this, which again, this is an annual report, so it's quite a bit, but I could come down here to the bottom and say, "Okay. What's going on in December?" Let's maybe see what this bill looks like here. So, I'm going to go ahead and click into this AP bill.

Sorry. Double-click to there on accident. Get back down to it. Okay. This is an actual AP bill. Now it's reversed. So, you can see the status here. So, probably not the best example, but it's the one I picked. I can see summary information here at the top. If it was paid, I'd be able to see that payment here as well and link to it. I can see the vendor information. And if you remember Amy mentioning, you can actually get away from paper. We can actually include the bill right here as a PDF, as an attachment. This is actually stored in the cloud, so you don't have to necessarily keep a copy if you don't want. You can get rid of all your paper filing cabinets and have things stored right in your solution and be able to reference them.

But then really where all that information the dashboard is coming from is down here in this entry section. So, here is where my GL account is at, but I've picked for this particular bill, the dollar amount and then all of the dimensions that I might use. So, you see I've got some of them here. But in this case, I'm using an allocation. So, let's look underneath my details dropdown here and I might see other dimensions if I have them set up. Maybe I'm using employees, but I can also see the allocation here.

This is called a transaction allocation. In this case, I'm doing a split across all of my cost center departments. And so, you can see here that it's just an even split. So, I typed in my number that the invoice was. It splits it automatically for me across my different departments. But this could be any combination of dimensions you can come up with. So, if you have predefined percentage splits, this is a great way to easily do that all in one place. You don't have to go calculate and figure out the dollar amounts or enter into different companies, even if it's different locations, you can do that.

I'm going to show you in a minute as well dynamic allocations, which is another way that you can do, after the fact, allocations that are even more complex than just a simple percentage. Okay. Let me go ahead and go back to our dashboard and show you a few of those specific transaction automations that we can help you put into place. One of them is inter-entity transactions. You can see here I have an inter-entity reconciliation report.

So, if you have any inter-entity due from accounts that you're managing in separate companies, this is definitely going to be a pain point for you. You can see here I've got ... In my case I have separate receivable and payable accounts. There's a lot of different configurations we can handle with this, but this is just how I have it aligned. And then across my columns, I have my entities. And from here, I can quickly see, for example, GW Physician Group, which I happen to know as entity 200, has a due from entity 100 of 1,151, which corresponds to this entity 100's due to, second right there, see that there's not reconciliation between the two that I might need to make an entry for this month.

I can also click into this and actually see the entries. So, let me show you what Intacct has done here automatically. So, here's the entry that it made. Let me go ahead and hop in here. I can see it's going to be, yep, the journal entry. So, this was a journal entry for an AP payment that was made. I can see that entity 200 was the one that made the payment. That's whose cash was credited. And then it went against entity 100's location AP. So, 200 paid a bill for 100 essentially is what this means.

This is the entry that was made whenever the AP bill was paid. Intacct automatically recognizes that this is an out of balance situation between my two entities and it's going to create the balancing entry for me. This is based on settings we set up so we can actually control whether or not entities can have this happen or if you want to give an error message if two entities should not interact and it can prevent errors or can do this automation for you where it's automatically creating the balancing offset into the due to and due from accounts.

All right. So, that's one example of automation. Another one is like I mentioned, dynamic allocations. So, if I hop back into my dynamic allocations report here, I have a quick one set up just to show you how allocations work. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on this, but I'll quickly show you how this can work. This is a benefits allocation, for example, based on salary and wages. Just for illustration purposes, I have the salary and wages account listed here for each department. Then here I have the before allocations total and the after allocations total. So, you can see here where they were before zero and then I allocated to them and they originally were all posted to dental, for whatever reason they posted them all to dental.

How those actually works is that you set up a methodology for Intacct to follow when allocating. And so, if I drill into this entry here, I want to get back to the original methodology. It was a fringe benefit allocation and here is what we had set up. So, you can actually put in a methodology for your allocations here or even an attachment if you need to. In this case, we are allocating based on department, but we're going to maintain the location values and it's all within a single-entity though it can do multi-entity allocations as well.

We're going to allocate 100% of the benefit expense here and we're going to run it every month so we have a monthly allocation. Each of these steps in your allocation here are going to have a corresponding calculation that you can actually drill into and see. So, this is great. If you get audited, you can give this link to your auditors and let them drill right in. They can see every single step of the allocation and how Intacct calculated it.

It's going to take the benefit expense. The basis is going to be the salary and wages expense by department. So, what it's going to do is calculate the percentage that each department has in salary and wages, and then it's going to make the target entry posting right here into this GL account, which is the account we saw here, employee benefits.

So, I'm not going to show you all the calculations, but here is the final calculation it did to make the split. So, every location and department combination, it calculated out the percentage allocation and then it made that entry that we saw back originally. So, if you're doing something like this all manually in Excel, just imagine if it happened either automatically or at the click of a button because you can have it recur or be a click to actually kick off the process.

Last but not least, I was going to show bank reconciliation a little bit, but I know that you guys are ... or running a little short on time, I want to leave some time for questions. So, what I'll do instead is maybe hop back into the PowerPoint and just talk about the bank reconciliation process a little bit. And then if anybody wants more information on bank reconciliations, I'm happy to have a separate call. Just let us know either in the chat or in the survey afterwards.

So, specifically on the bank feeds. So, bank feeds, essentially mean that we're connecting out to your bank account out there and in the cloud. That way your bank account is online as everybody is now, or this can be done through an import if your bank doesn't allow connections. But depends a lot on the bank. We bring those transactions into Intacct. If it's on the auto-feed, it's every four hours. Within Intacct, we actually will set up rules that can either create transactions for you, maybe you're creating your bank fee or other things that are recurring transactions. Or at a minimum, we're trying to match those transactions to existing transactions in Intacct.

So, that means that you can actually transition to daily or weekly reconciliations. Some of my clients are, a lot of them are starting to do daily reconciliations of their cash because the transactions are coming in automatically. And if it's finding a match in Intacct already, it's just clearing it for you. And so, what you're really reviewing on a daily basis is the outstanding items that don't have a match for some reason.

On those items, you can actually create from directly in the reconciliation screen, you can create the transaction. So, whether it was a vendor payment or some transfer, whatever it may be, you can create that transaction right there within the bank reconciliation screen and then match it up automatically. So, it really allows to stay right on top of your cash all the time.

So, if you're in a nightmare scenario of having to do a huge bank record at the end of the month, this can get you out of that and get you into doing all those reconciliations very automated on a daily basis. All right. So, that's going to really wrap up my demo. I wanted to leave a few minutes for questions. I'm going to go ahead and actually pop over to one of our last slides here. Just a quick review of the different trends. I don't know, Amy, do you want to talk through this one really quickly before we hop to some questions?

Amy Jongerius:Sure. Yes. Of course. At the end of the day, I think, again, as finance leaders, I would just highly encourage you to step back and think about your practice and really figure out where could you leverage some technology or automation. And also, if you're struggling with consolidations in that multi-entity space, or again trying to find better reporting to your physicians and your owners, it's worth the investment to look at enhancing your financial management system. So, yes, I know that might not be a necessary to do at the moment or goal or objective or from a strategy perspective, but it's worth the time to invest in your technology so that you can save your time and spend it best on providing those KPI dashboards and high-level information to your owners and providers. Great. Hand it over to Emily.

Emily Madere:Yeah. Can you hear me?

Amy Jongerius:Yes.

Emily Madere:Yep. Okay. Sorry about that. Technology. So, I definitely hope you enjoyed today's webinar and we do have a lot more questions in the chat that I think we'll have time to answer a couple. But I just wanted to point out that Sage Intacct is just about one of what EisnerAmper offers in the healthcare industry. So, if you need anything from audits or cybersecurity risk from a healthcare standpoint, EisnerAmper can help.

So, some questions. Let me check my time. Okay. So, I think one that a couple people ask, Karen, this one's for you, what does a Sage Intacct implementation look like?

Karen Penhallegon:Okay. That's a great question. So, the average implementation takes from kickoff to go live probably three to four months. So, a lot of people get afraid of the ERP implementation think they're going to take multiple years. That's not usually the case. What we will do a very high-level implementation process is that we start out with a very detailed dive into how are you doing things today and then how do you want to change those processes going forward, whether that's to get new reports or just to make things more efficient. So, basically, we're helping you translate into how Intacct will handle your day-to-day.

Then we go through a phase of setting the system up and doing data conversion. We have a modeling or a testing phase where you're doing training and testing in the solution. And then after that you're live. So, we stick around with you. The implementation team specifically stays usually for six to eight weeks to get you through your first month-end. And then we have a customer success and support team. So, you continue to work with EisnerAmper even after you're live in the system. We're your partner for life with Sage Intacct.

So, you don't have to call an 800 number or anything like that. You're going to reach out to somebody here that knows you and knows your business even after your live.

Emily Madere:Thank you.

Karen Penhallegon:Very high-level summary there.

Emily Madere:I think that was great. And then Amy, what accounting software do you see most often and what is the one main struggle across the board for that accounting software?

Amy Jongerius:Great question, Emily. Thank you so much. I would say that we see a lot of clients in QuickBooks Online, which is a great platform. Keep in mind that QuickBooks Online is not HIPAA compliance. You have to be very mindful about the data that you put into QuickBooks Online. And so, that would be my one caveat to QuickBooks Online.

But again, for a lot of clients who are looking for more customizable reports, QuickBooks Online obviously comes with its set standard of reporting. And so, when I have clients that move from QuickBooks to Sage Intacct, they are dramatically seeing the improvement in just the reporting capabilities that they have from what they were used to.

So, again, every platform that's out there, obviously, has its pros and cons. But I definitely would encourage if you are struggling with customizing reports or just getting real-time data to be able to report upon, I'd highly suggest looking at Sage Intacct because it is a very powerful tool and it's well-recommended for healthcare entities.

Emily Madere:Okay. And we are at time. Everyone else who asks questions in the chat, I will make sure to follow up with you at the end of the day. And if you have anything else, this is our contact information. We're more than happy to take your emails. But I will pass it back to Bella.

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