SerenaGroup Saves 24 Workdays a Year

SerenaGroup is a global healthcare management company with a specialty in wound care and hyperbaric medicine. They have locations across the United States and work with hospitals, nursing facilities, and wound treatment centers.

SerenaGroup’s financial structure separates their locations into 25 to 30 separate cost centers. Their month-end closing process requires creating a full P&L statement for each individual site, which is then compared to the budget every reporting period.

Before Centage, SerenaGroup’s controller Joe Paratore produced all of the individual P&Ls within QuickBooks Enterprise, but this solution didn’t support consolidating all of the statements into the summarized report he needed.

Quickly & easily merge 25+ P&L statements into a consolidated monthly report

Joe’s Excel workaround for this problem involved a 2-3 day process every month. He’d export the 25 to 30 individual P&Ls from QuickBooks in batches, then merge the spreadsheets to develop the consolidated P&L.

Because of the time it took to collect and format the reports and then resolve the errors he inevitably encountered, he was unable to produce precise forecasts, including down to the cost “center level.”

By limiting the use of QuickBooks Enterprise to handle only the actuals, and then supplementing it with Centage’s suite of robust budgeting, forecasting, and reporting tools, SerenaGroup shaved days off the time their finance team spent cleaning up Excel errors and consolidating reports across cost centers.

A budgeting process that took days now done in minutes

“Now I close the month in QuickBooks, bring the actuals into Centage, change the reporting period in Analytics Maestro and have it recalculate. The 25 P&Ls and the consolidated version are done within just a few minutes.”

Centage enables SerenaGroup’s finance team to produce the 25-30 individual P&Ls and the consolidated version with the click of a few buttons. SerenaGroup saves at least 24 workdays a year previously spent compiling and formatting monthly reports and forecasts in Excel.

What used to take two full working days every month now takes minutes, and there’s no fear of formula errors, missed data, or broken links.

These time savings also translate to meaningful overhead savings: thanks to Centage, SerenaGroup has been able to defer adding another accountant to their team.

SerenaGroup’s ROI with Centage

Translating these time savings and efficiency boosts to approximate dollar values can give us a rough estimate of the cost savings from FP&A software.

• Time savings on manual/repetitive tasks = over $11,000 per year
• Personnel savings = average salary of a full-time accountant in the region = about $69,000 per year

These deferred and avoided costs offset the expense of the software by more than $56,000 — but it’s hard to put a true value on the time saved.

Effortlessly allocate personnel & overhead expenses to individual facilities

“With Centage, I expect it’ll take no longer than a week to two weeks to build the full budget, compared to a month.”

SerenaGroup also needed to allocate overhead expenses to individual facilities. One layer of allocation was needed to spread personnel costs among cost centers (individuals often work at more than one location), and a second layer of allocation was needed to spread overhead expenses to individual facilities after personnel expenses had been allocated.

SerenaGroup was able to complete the double layer of allocations they needed by creating a custom-built, automated process that performed the overhead allocation after the personnel allocation was complete, thus producing the cost center distribution results that SerenaGroup was looking for.

They also created a new data group for personnel expenses that gave them a far more detailed look at payroll expenditures at the FTE and location level. This enables them to confirm they’re on track to meet their operational goals at any given time.

Better and more actionable information tailored to a growing business

“Centage has changed our decision-making process because we have better information, quicker, and then we can update or make changes to the company as needed.”

The old budgeting process was adequate for a small number of cost centers, but didn’t allow for the agility that and flexibility that SerenaGroup’s growing business required.

Since upgrading to Centage, SerenaGroup uses a uniform report template for the cost center and consolidated P&L reports, enabling them to analyze and  compare year-over-year models to make better decisions, faster.

Centage saves the office of finance time in creating budgets, and also simplifies the process of presenting consolidated reports with drill-down abilities to the CFO and others in the C-suite.

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