The Importance of Tracking Metrics in Real-Time
Waiting until the end of the month to look at your data is an easy pitfall to fall into. However, by the time the problems are staring back at you, it’s often too late to fix them.
Moving to real-time tracking gives you continuous visibility into site, service and funding performance at any time, so you can spot issues as they arise and take proactive steps to resolve them.
In this article, we’ll cover key metrics for healthcare leaders and how you can easily track them in real-time, without any manual work.
Recommended Metrics: Financial
EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortisation)
Measures operational profitability by excluding non-operating expenses. This is a key figure used by investors and should be monitored carefully.
Operating Margin
Calculates the percentage of revenue after subtracting the cost of goods, services and operating expenses. This metric can deteriorate silently if not reviewed regularly.
Outstanding Debt
Billing can be particularly complex for care providers, as funding can come from a mix of local authorities, individuals or family members. Tracking this by resident and funder provides full visibility of debt.
Revenue Growth Rate
The percentage increase/decrease in a company’s total sales is a vital indicator of financial health and can indicate when you should consider investing in growth.
Customer Acquisition Cost vs. Customer Lifetime Value
These metrics reveal how much it costs to win new customers, what value they bring and what your ROI is. It can also be valuable to measure the effectiveness of your sales and marketing.
Recommended Metrics: Operational
Employee Headcount
This is important to maintain safe and compliant staffing ratios, prevent understaffing and highlight any staff retention issues early, so they can be resolved.
Agency Hours & Spend
Agency staff spending can be a significant drain on profits, so keeping a close eye on this can help inform staffing and hiring decisions to prevent reliance on agency staff.
Cost per Visit
Reveals your true profit margin by considering labour and travel costs. These insights can help you manage overheads, pricing strategies and optimise caregiver routes.
Revenue per Treatment
Measuring how much revenue different treatments bring into the organisation can help with resource allocation, pricing strategies and which services to focus on.
Care Hours Delivered
Represents the intersection of workforce capacity, financial efficiency, and clinical safety, so you can balance budgets with delivering high-quality care.
Occupied Beds & Available Beds
For nursing and care homes, tracking occupancy levels helps you make staffing decisions and measures the effectiveness of any strategies to increase occupancy.
Carer Utilisation Rate
Measures the percentage of a paid carer’s schedule that is actively spent performing billable care, helping you to identify inefficiencies and recruitment needs.
Did Not Attend (DNA)
Every missed appointment is unrecoverable lost revenue. Tracking your DNA rate can identify trends and highlight need for strategies to reduce no-shows.
Tracking these metrics in real-time is important because it reveals areas of underperformance, identifies problems before they impact operations and helps you make strategic decisions.
If you’re thinking to yourself, “How am I going to track all of that daily?”, then carry on reading. Hint: It doesn’t involve manually exporting and formatting the data every day.
How to Track Metrics in Real-Time
The best way to achieve real-time data tracking is by setting up dashboards with the KPIs that matter most to you.
Many software solutions have built-in reporting and dashboard features. If you’re not utilising what you already have, then the KPIs listed in this article should provide a good starting point.
However, if you’re using lots of separate systems across different departments, logging in and out of each dashboard prevents you from seeing the full picture clearly. For example, you might have one dashboard for finance, another for HR, operations, marketing and so on.
The golden setup would be to connect live data from all these sources and plug them into a single reporting tool with dashboards that can be filtered, tweaked and shared with others. That’s where solutions such as Sage Intacct and Power BI come in.
6 Ways Sage Intacct Helps
Sage Intacct’s reports and dashboards make tracking the data that’s important to you as easy as a few clicks. Here’s an overview of the core features and what they can do for you:
1) Reports
The reporting tools come with 150+ pre-made reports or you can use the custom report writer to build your own from scratch, combining any of the fields in Sage Intacct.
2) Dashboards
Reports can be embedded into your dashboards to display all the live data you need, with clickable links to explore figures in more detail.
Each KPI can be added as a ‘Performance Card’ along the top of your Sage Intacct dashboard, with visual indicators to show positive or negative change.
3) Statistical Accounts
Statistical Accounts are a way of storing non-financial metrics alongside your financial data in Sage Intacct. Rather than holding values in pounds, they hold quantities, counts, volumes, hours, beds, residents, visits, etc. These metrics can be used in reports, dashboards and allocations. For example, a head office could allocate £200,000 across all homes based on occupied beds or number of residents.
4) Dimensions
Sage Intacct has dimensions which act as tags to categorise your data. They allow you to filter your dashboards and analyse data at region, site, service and funding level.
5) User Access
The user permissions give you full control over which users can access what data and how much they can do with it.
6) Multi-Entity Architecture
In Sage Intacct, all your entities and locations share the same database and chart of accounts. That means all your data can be instantly combined in reports and dashboards, without manual consolidation and spreadsheets.
The PKF SCS Difference
Our team of Sage Intacct experts are here to listen to your needs and build the system around you and your business, giving you complete financial clarity and control.
Don’t just take it from us, read the case study with Medical Research Network to hear how we got them up and running with Sage Intacct and the positive impact it has had.
“We quickly found that Sage Intacct handled multi-entities, multi-currency, and more dynamic reporting a lot better, and as requirements from the rest of the business also grew so that Finance as a function could deliver more value, it was clear why the change in system was required.” – Alex Prentice, Head of Transactional Finance at Medical Research Network.
Healthcare Financial Reporting FAQs
What is a good operating margin for a healthcare organisation?
A good operating margin depends on the type of healthcare organisation, but providers should aim for a positive and stable margin that allows them to invest in staff, technology, facilities and future growth.
Industry research from Knight Frank found average EBITDARM margins of 30.1% across UK care homes in 2025, although this figure excludes rent and management costs.
How can healthcare organisations reduce reliance on agency staff?
The first step is measuring agency spend consistently. Real-time visibility of staffing costs, utilisation rates, occupancy levels and workforce trends can help identify opportunities to improve scheduling, recruitment and retention strategies.
What warning signs should a healthcare business look out for?
A few of the key warning signals a healthcare business should look out for include declining operating margins, slowing revenue growth and high staff turnover. Tracking these metrics continuously allows you to respond quickly before it’s too late.
Written by: Jessica Allen, Marketing Executive at PKF Smith Cooper Systems.
Reviewed by: Sam Pidgeon, Sage Intacct Product Lead at PKF Smith Cooper Systems.
Last reviewed: July 2026.
