How Medical Practices Can Stay On Budget

Are you finding it increasingly difficult for your growing Medical Practice to stay on budget? Finance leaders should be aware of these Critical Budgeting Best Practices:

Quit Excel Today:
Greater than 88% of spreadsheets contain errors. A fat finger can throw off your whole budget and locating the anomaly in excel can be a painstaking hunt. It's time all medical practices adopt an efficient, secure and accurate financial management system to leverage dimensionalized budgeting and reforecasting below the trial balance level. One that helps finance professionals quickly recognize and reconcile errors, so they can spend more time on analysis.

Adopt Reforecasting:
Reforecasting enables Senior Finance Executives to adjust projected revenues, expenses and overall bottom line based on incoming actuals. Medical Practices that adopt a reforecasting process can more quickly adjust to market fluctuations. Developing a monthly or quarterly reforecasting procedure will provide you with proactive alerts before you're expected to miss budget, and allow you to act within the period to right the ship.

Get Daily Updates:
Leverage variance reports and custom dashboards to monitor for daily updates on the KPIs that matter most to your practice. Be alerted in real time when revenues dip, or expenses rise. A quick daily view of the overall financial health of your organization ensures you’re prioritizing your time while keeping your finger on the pulse of the business' finances.

Practice Dimensionalized Budgeting & Reporting:
Define what account structures (cost centers, departments) associated with the chart of accounts are available for budgeting and reporting. Segment by physician, location, specialty, or modality to create specialized views that will help uncover profit leaks. Are we overstaffed? Are we spending too much on supplies? These questions and many more can be answered when you practice dimensionalized budgeting and reporting.

Devote Time to a Robust Allocations Analysis:
Perhaps your physicians are being under-compensated for their geographic region? Or you might be considering taking on a new insurance carrier… Can you test what-if scenarios with ease? Having the flexibility to perform multi-variable analysis to assess the impact of decision making on the bottom line is the ultimate goal. This is where budgeting and forecasting intersect, and informed financial leaders find their path forward.

These five best-practices are easy to achieve with a Corporate Performance Management platform that provides powerful features for finance executives. By upgrading from Excel or Quickbooks to a CPM system like Adaptive Insights, scaling medical practices are forecasting better, staying on budget, and shifting focus to the big picture.

Finance leaders in healthcare are realizing the significant benefits of a platform that automates tedious tasks, ensures a single source of data truth, and enables better budgeting and forecasting.

When these systems are SaaS based, or "in the cloud," additional benefits can be realized, like the shifting of budget from capital expenditures for IT infrastructure to operating expenses for software licenses. This transition from CAPEX to OPEX can help pave the way for increased business agility, decreased overhead and the shifting of burden from internal employees to your managed service provider under contract.

Making an investment in your financial management systems now will both prepare your growing company for the future, and provide the transparency necessary today to make better growth oriented decisions to reach your goals.

Want to learn more about how Business Solution Partners can provide the software, process consulting and training to help your growing medical practice solve for the demands of modern healthcare? Check out our webinar "Maximizing The Bottom Line For Medical Practices."