FP&A Software Opens Efficient, Collaborative Budgeting

Intuitive FP&A software fosters collaboration & accountability

Carroll County Memorial Hospital is a 25-bed critical access hospital in Carrollton, MO. They provide emergency services, diagnostic services, day surgeries, outpatient specialty clinics, rehabilitation services, family care, cancer care, and more.

CCMH had been using Excel for budgeting and planning, a manual process that led to too many broken formulas. One of the biggest challenges for CFO Lesley Delaney was coordinating the contributions of different departments during the budgeting process:

“We wanted the directors in each patient care area – from rehab to radiology to the surgical unit and onward – to  have access to their budget information so they could be involved and take ownership, which was difficult to do in Excel.”

She wanted a more sophisticated solution than Excel to streamline the budgeting process, ensure greater accuracy in the numbers, and enable easy access for budget contributors.

Quickly gather contributor data without breaking formulas

“Because this solution is so easy to use, we have a lot of ownership from the directors. They can easily go in and review and really own their own budget numbers.”

Today, CCMH uses Centage for their annual budgeting and planning. The team begins with their capital budget, then revenue budget, then expenses.

Once the annual budget has been completed and approved, they rely on Centage's advanced reporting capabilities to create variance reports that are then distributed to the patient care area directors so they can review their own budget vs. actuals and adjust if necessary.

Intuitive automation accelerates the budgeting cycle

“Having the data automatically input from Dynamics GP into Centage and having everything in the right spot at the end, it’s been a nice upgrade for us.”

Centage “does the back-end work for you,” enabling CCMH’s finance team to easily build the next year’s budget and involve the necessary contributors. Centage offers intuitive automation out of the box, and streamlines the collaboration process, enabling users to work together on the upcoming year’s budgeting process.

Because Centage operates as an extension of the GL and automatically pulls in actuals data, CCMH can monitor and analyze their budget vs. actuals whenever they need, something they weren’t able to do before.

Accessibility to non-finance users simplifies the review process

Not only does the finance team at CCMH find Centage easy to use — they also have strong support and ownership from the patient care area directors because they are able to contribute, review, and maintain their individual department budget numbers and compare them to their actuals throughout the year. This provides more accurate insight into financial health and performance across the organization.

The ability to easily view one piece of the budget at a time – whether it’s drilling into revenue or drivers or expenses – also helps simplify the budget review process, especially for non-finance users like the patient care directors.

“I have used other budgeting software in the past and Centage is one of the most user-friendly ones out there.”

Book a demo to learn more about Centage’s formula-free FP&A software.