How Gardant Simplified Senior Living Reporting with Sage Intacct

0:07 Uh, we have integrated Sage Intacct, which is our ERP software. We have that as a nightly integration.

0:16 We also use data from Paycom, though it's not directly integrated. We have someone on our team who uploads data after each payroll, as well as some other internal data that we use.

0:39 Our company is in the assisted living industry. We manage different communities in various states that offer Medicaid and private pay.

0:52 Each community has its own set of books, payroll, etc., so Solver is very useful for combining those various books.

1:08 Each of the communities that we manage has its own set of books, so we wanted software that would allow us to create reporting where we could compare all of these communities to each other, as well as provide combined reporting for ownership across several communities. Solver helps us with this.

1:34 We also wanted to have one place where budgeting would be housed so we could compare those items and go to one place to see all those budget items. Prior to Solver, we budgeted in Excel, and there were a lot of manual issues that could occur.

1:59 Solver's been great so far. I feel like our capability to create reports and produce them for the benefit of the whole company, including operations and the various executive directors at the communities, has been outstanding.

2:15 We've heard nothing but praise for the reports that we provide. I believe we're only limited by our knowledge of Solver so far. We're a growing company, and we've had new people join the team that we're training on Solver. I think having some of our team attend the conference this year will help us learn how to use Solver even better and improve our reporting.

2:57 The main reason we chose Solver was to solve a budgeting issue. We were budgeting very manually in Excel, and any changes had to be made by opening an Excel file for every single community, updating it, and saving it back.

3:15 There were also issues where someone could make a manual adjustment to a budget and throw everything off. By having it in Solver, we have control over it. We can make adjustments one time that impact all budgets.

3:38 We're also able to pull information and compare it. Just the ability to create a report once and pull it for multiple months using the same data set has greatly improved efficiency.

3:54 We've also been able to create reports for ownership groups that have received nothing but praise. The efficiency and timeliness of these reports have greatly helped us.

4:12 We've created individual reports that benefit our company and fit our needs. The budgets are customized to how we present items.

4:29 We haven't made any customizations to Solver itself, but the templates are unique to our company and our needs.

4:45 Solver is used primarily by the analysis team, but we're able to pull various reports that greatly help our operations team.

4:55 There are different metrics they look at at different points in time, especially trailing 12-month reports for all communities with separate books in our accounting software. We can pull one report and provide it to them.

5:13 We've also compared budgets across communities with the same ownership group so we can better understand why one community may be outperforming another.

5:24 The analysis team is the only group with access to Solver right now. However, we're pulling data for various departments, especially operations.

5:38 The collaboration between the analysis team and operations is very strong. We work together constantly to improve not only the communities but the company as a whole.

5:53 We love being able to create a report once. After it's saved and published, others on the analysis team can access it, run it, export it to Excel, and send it out. We don't have to recreate the report every month.

6:15 That's an efficiency in itself. We have several reports for our executive suite that we've refined over time. People can now run them and send them to leadership, giving them a snapshot of how the communities and company are performing.

6:47 Right now we're using Solver mainly for budgeting and portfolio-wide reports.

6:55 We definitely want to expand Solver's use into forecasting and multiple budget versions. We haven't done that yet because we've been growing as a company and onboarding new team members to our current processes.

7:19 As our team grows, becomes more stable, and attends conferences, we're hoping to expand how we use Solver to better meet our owners' and company's needs.

7:39 The benefits we've received from using Solver have been significant. There are many efficiencies gained simply by having everything in one place.

7:46 Being able to create a report once and run it repeatedly has saved numerous hours. Previously, we would have had to recreate reports or combine multiple exported files.

8:05 There's also reduced risk because only certain people can modify formulas and data. Having everything housed in one place has greatly benefited us.

8:24 I've heard nothing but wonderful things about Solver from people outside the analysis team. They see what we're able to do with it and rave about it, which is great to hear.

8:47 Our Solver trainer, John Straos, was excellent. I can't say enough good things about him. He was always available to help us.

8:56 We actually transitioned to Solver at the beginning of COVID, so we were all working from home while learning the system. John was always willing to jump on a call, review issues with us, and get back to us with solutions.

9:20 We had tremendous support from him to get everything working. As far as implementation, I wasn't involved with connecting the data from our existing software. Another member of our team handled that.

9:35 I think there were parts of the implementation we could have done a little better. Because of the timing during COVID and remote work, some things may have been overlooked.

9:58 We're correcting some of those things now as we become more familiar with Solver and what we want from the software. For other organizations, I think it's important to consider not only how you'll use Solver today but also how you'll use it in the future.

10:14 That future planning will help determine how you structure your data warehouse and what you want to accomplish with Solver.

10:22 Overall, though, the training and implementation went wonderfully.