You use many software platforms to run your business, and each offers a dynamic set of metrics.
What if you had a way to see how those metrics affect each other? A way to align them – showing the best route to your destination (profitability) and alert you to roadblocks in your path?
In our last article, Business Detours? Not A Problem When You Set Your GPS, we described how business intelligence and predictive analytics form a GPS to help frontline managers navigate the financial side of your company.
Enter a GPS solution called DreamCORE Dashboards – CORE is an acronym for the controllable parts of your business: Census* | Overtime | Receivables | Expenses.
*This model was built for the skilled nursing industry but is applicable anywhere –C is your Customers or Clients, your revenue source.
Let’s take a closer look at Census, and how you can use this fluctuating element to improve both customer satisfaction and your profitability.
Census – The Lives We Care For
Census is the lives we care for within our skilled nursing facilities. Our clinical teams treat and care for the individuals entrusted to us, ensuring the right solutions to help heal in the best way, in the best atmosphere.
Financially, census drives the revenue. We need to capitalize on every dollar of revenue to support the mission of care – nursing supplies, dietary sustenance, entertainment, housekeeping, administration.
The industry has worked out multiple algorithms to ensure the best journey of the revenue dollar to the table– through a labyrinth of documentation, carve outs, comorbidities coding, and specifications that vary widely by payers.
What success have we had managing “the dollars on the table”?
Managing Expenses against Fluctuating Revenue
Staying true to the GPS theme, finance develops a roadmap yearly, the “budget”. It is well thought out, achievable, and precise. The day after it is published, the path to success begins to deteriorate. Road conditions are constantly changing (lower than expected census), unexpected detours (transmission on your van konks out), inevitably you must stop, take time to get a true sense of where you are on the map, and recalculate your path to the destination.
DreamCORE is constantly recalculating to support your goals – by providing you the pinpoint on the map of where you are at any given time, and where you need to go to stay on course to your destination.
For example, your dietary manager was budgeted $35,263 for Raw Food for May–pinned to his corkboard–this budget was calculated last October and was based on a census budget of $8.26 PPD. The actual census for May is averaging $9.75 PPD. If the dietary manager spends the original budget of $35,263, DreamCORE gives clear sight to the overspend of $7,778. The thermometer shows current spend against scaled budget – making it much easier to adjust spending to meet current census level.
A significant ROI of DreamCORE is based in the automatic adjustment of the budgets.
In the example above, the dietary manager’s expense dashboard would show the budget for his department is $26.747. And daily the “Expected Budget” would be adjusted by the Average Daily Census in the background. Additionally, with each invoice entered into DreamCORE, the budget balance would be reduced, like a checkbook, keeping the whole department informed of their current balance, helping them not to “overdraw” the account.
So being able to see the financial picture at a quick glance enables small changes, which over time make a big impact.
This automation keeps the patient at the center – each operational department is rotating around the patient, spending what is necessary to create the healing experience. Your teams are working with their patients, not sitting at desks looking at numbers. They’re solving people problems to create the best customer experience.
On the Journey to success
Consider you’re on the road to your destination and your GPS tells you there’s an accident ahead, you should exit now to the alternate route. You choose to disregard GPS and within a few minutes you’re at a dead standstill. Half an hour later, you pass the accident, but you’ve lost 30 minutes. Even speeding at this point won’t get you to the destination on time. A small change to the alternate route may have made the difference.
DreamCORE provides clear analytics to help you and your teams pinpoint their exact location, adjust for what is ahead, and equipping you to stay on course to the destination.
Getting your people to love their numbers
What if each of your department leaders were taught how to use a financial GPS to make the right decisions for their department?
Look at the flip side: “You don’t know what you don’t know”–When they don’t understand where they are or where to go, they’re on a path to fail. Nobody hires on to fail! They want to do well – to succeed at their jobs means they meet expectations.
DreamCORE encourages camaraderie – when all the departments are working harmoniously, they start to see how they can help each other toward the greater good. One department has an unexpected capital expense, the rest can tighten their belts a bit to balance that out.
As an operator, you want to be competitive. You want to hire the best person to run each of your departments. So you hire a great culinary talent to run dietary, but he’s probably not an MBA. He can easily be taught to read DreamCORE, understand the expectation, and DreamCORE can free his time to be where he needs to be – providing a great customer experience.
Your department leaders know their priority is the best customer experience. When they know where they are financially, they make the best decisions. They’ll make the best decision for the company every time because they want to feel good about their work. They want to succeed. And you know that successful teams reduce turnover and build great culture.
Teaching them how to read a quick DreamCORE view of their department can set them up to succeed, which leads to managing the dollars already on the table.
Give them a clear solution to feed that success.
Book a live demo – Grab a spot on our calendar here.
