Infinite Care is a leading residential aged care provider that has facilities in Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia with more in the pipeline. They partnered with QMetrix to move from a spreadsheet-based process to implementing Workday Adaptive Planning.
Challenge
Infinite Care was doing detailed financial modelling for its 17 facilities on Excel. This included budgeting and forecasting for 3-way financial statements, and across a range of costs centres and entities.
The budget process took a long time and it was challenging to consolidate numbers throughout the process and pivot efficiently. Even simple things like adding new general ledger accounts was laborious. Opening, updating or closing a spreadsheet could also take minutes. It was tedious for the finance team and problematic to administer.
There was also a single point of sensitivity – only one finance analyst in the organisation knew how to run the budget process and had all the knowledge; no one else could do it.
Infinite Care was looking for a solution that could improve all of the above. They also wanted to expand their capabilities, such as to easily do scenario modelling or change variables and run multiple versions, especially since they were growing fast with acquisitions.
Solution
Infinite Care chose Workday Adaptive Planning for its functionality and worked with QMetrix as their implementation partner to deliver on their goals.
Completing the budget quicker than ever
The budgeting process used to take several months from end-to-end, and part way through they would need to consolidate and see how the numbers were landing to decide which levers to pull.
In Excel, this was extremely difficult and time consuming. There was no live data and you had to wait until you got to a certain point, then run a macro to consolidate things.
Now with Workday Adaptive Planning, Infinite Care can see how numbers are impacted, live and immediately. This helps the finance team as well as budget owners be more efficient and make clear, data backed decisions.
Meetings with the leadership and Board have also become smoother. When questions come up, the finance team are able to answer on the spot due to the way Adaptive Planning lets them slice and dice, and drill up and down to get information on the spot.
They also added detailed reporting and analytics as part of budget process, including metrics such as cost per occupied day bed, and occupancy and staffing ratios, all of which are critical in helping to manage each facility.
Infinite Care was able to implement not just a new system, but deliver the budget to the Board two months faster than with the previous Excel-based process. Zane Ali, Chief Financial Officer at Infinite Care, considers this a big win with Adaptive Planning. He says, “It served us so well from an outcomes perspective and was very successful.”
A monthly rolling forecast that is 75% faster
Infinite Care brings in actuals every month and re-forecast for the next 5 years on a monthly basis. They could do this in Excel but it was a lengthy process which took two people two whole days to process every month.
Now with Adaptive Planning, it takes just one person half a day to roll over the numbers and check. Adaptive Planning then spins out a 3-way forecasted Balance Sheet, Cashflow, and Profit and Loss statement. As Zane says, “It exceeded my expectations”.
Furthermore, it has become easier to run what-if modelling so they can quickly evaluate the financial impacts of various scenarios and adopt the preferred or likely option.
Automated data flows
When it comes to data at Infinite Care, Tech One pulls the General Ledger into a Data Warehouse, and performance reporting is done out of Power BI. In the past, they would have to manually run a CSV, download and manipulate data, and transform it into a format suitable for Excel.
Now, the Data Warehouse directly integrates with Workday Adaptive Planning and there is two way data flow. Data is pulled from the Data Warehouse into Workday Adaptive Planning and once final, it is pushed back into the Data Warehouse so they can be visualised in Power BI.
This saves time, effort and risk of error, while freeing up the team to do more value-adding activities.
Complexity – now simplified and powered up
Residential aged care can be challenging to model financially and forecast, with complexities in many areas. The finance team needs to consider revenue with intricacies like the Australian National Aged Care Classification (AN-ACC) funding model, occupancy classes and additional services to factor in.
Expense models are complicated, with labour being a huge part of it. Infinite Care has hundreds of staff rostered per shift. With assumptions like pay rate, care minutes, loading shift hours, award pay rate and custom calendars, this was massive to manage in Excel, and cumbersome even when a simple change had to be made.
To streamline this, QMetrix built a Master Roster model which includes all those assumptions but is much easier to administer. It no longer relies on look-ups and loads much faster – in seconds, not minutes. Furthermore, there is greater transparency and traceability – they can explore any data point and answer where every number has come from or goes to.
Zane says, “If you are good at Excel modelling, you can set up a central repository for business functions and all your sheets tag off that. But if a file changes location or doesn’t update properly, you won’t have the right assumptions and miss things. The great thing about Adaptive Planning is you don’t have to worry about that. You can trust that the data is right.”
Easy to use, for everyone
Zane tells us that Infinite Care has been through a lot of change in the past few years. He initially had concerns about change fatigue, but this didn’t turn out to be the case at all.
“I was impressed with how quickly the finance team jumped on board. Workday Adaptive Planning has been intuitive and easy to navigate,” he says. Even in the thick of budget season, I was able to self-teach and navigate, do administrative functions and integration pieces, and make changes on the fly. As the CFO, I wasn’t involved in the detailed implementation aspects, but I could figure things out myself. It would have been even easier for people who are more tech savvy than I am.”
What it’s like working with QMetrix
When asked what it was like working with QMetrix, Zane said, “I have been happy with the Workday Adaptive Planning solution, and QMetrix has been exceptional to work with.
“I tend to be sceptical of what consultants can deliver, especially for the price you pay. But that has not been the case with QMetrix. They were transparent with costings, worked with us on price and services delivered, and our partnership with them has been so worth it.
“From project management, to implementation, to hyper-care, they have always been on time, delivered on scope, and within budget. Meetings were to the point, we received good status update reports, and they executed really well.
“We have a complex entity structure and I set high expectations for this project. QMetrix understood the business and were able to use the Excel models as a guide to design, build and improve on the process to ensure significant value add within Workday Adaptive Planning.
“Even when the implementation phase was complete, they continued to be responsive and helpful. I am very happy to recommend them.”
Zane Ali, CFO
Impact for Infinite Care
- Automated data flows as the Data Warehouse is integrated with Workday Adaptive Planning
- Budget delivered two months earlier than before
- Ability to do monthly rolling forecasts 75% faster
- Complex financial models are simpler to manage, less labour intensive and can be trusted to update accurately across the board
- Ability to scenario plan, test variations, make decisions and pull levers more efficiently
- Meetings with leadership are more informative and decisive as reports can be drilled up and down on the spot to understand potential effects immediately
- Ease of use – no dependency on a single person to know how to work the data and spreadsheets; the intuitive system has been adopted by the whole finance team