Budget Management for Care Homes
From keeping the lights on to paying staff, your budget has to stretch far and wide across many expenses to keep your business moving forward.
Budgeting for care homes is a complex task due to fluctuating occupancy rates and rising staffing costs, but there are tools which make it easier.
In this article, we’ll discuss how Sage Intacct helps you build budgets and stick to them.
But first, the elephant in the room…
“Can’t We Just Use Spreadsheets?”
Many small businesses use spreadsheets for building budgets which is fine initially, but as your business grows, that’s where the cracks appear:
- Prone to human error, such as typos and broken formulas
- Difficult to collaborate, not enough security so everyone sees everything
- Emailing around documents and getting mixed up with different versions
- Spending large amounts of time entering data from your finance system
- Rigid, hard work to update and can’t test changes/try out scenarios
Not only does this make building your budget hard work in the first place but it also means you can’t easily make tweaks as situations change. For most small finance teams, they don’t have the time and resources to revisit their budget throughout the year.
Budgeting is vital for keeping spending on track, so it’s worth investing in purpose-built tools like the ones available with Sage Intacct.
Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct isn’t just a budgeting tool; it’s a cloud accounting platform which houses everything you need to manage all aspects of your care home finances.
Let’s look at a few of the specific ways that Sage Intacct helps you manage budgets.
Build Budgets & Forecasts Easily
Sage Intacct Planning (SIP) is a dedicated budgeting and forecasting platform which includes everything you need to make better, faster, more informed decisions.
It integrates with Sage Intacct, pulling in data such as your actuals, dimensions and GL accounts, so you don’t have to manually add your data.
- Send the budget for review and get feedback within the platform
- Create formulas, save for future use and share calculations with budget approvers
- Build as many scenarios as you like to help prepare for different eventualities – find answers to questions like “what if we hired two more carers?”
- Build different forecasts, compare them against each other and your budget
All or parts of the budget can be shared with Home Managers to add budget lines. So, you can collaborate freely while ensuring only the right people see the right data. Plus, as it’s accessed online, you can be assured you’re all working from the same version.
Once completed, the whole budget can be exported back into Sage Intacct where you can apply it to your day-to-day financial operations
Stop Overspending in Its Tracks
Spend Management helps you stick to your budget by automatically checking the relevant budget as transactions are being posted.
The rules in Spend Management allow you to configure it to your needs. You can choose to turn on validation for Purchasing, Accounts Payable and/or General Ledger. Plus, for each module you can choose whether to display a warning or block transactions when they exceed budget.
You can also include committed expenses in calculations, which will include approved purchases that haven’t been invoiced yet, like supplier contracts or Purchase Orders.
Monitor Budget Spend in Real Time
The Dashboards in Sage Intacct aren’t just pretty to look at, they’re a window into your business’ real-time financial performance.
They’re fully customisable, so you can build your own personal dashboard with reports such as Profit and Loss and KPIs such as Revenue and Operating Expenses, so you can access key data all from one place.
In addition, you can use the filters to look at a specific home, region or compare data across the organisation, depending on your needs.
From there, you can click to open the report for more detail and drill further down into individual figures without having to search around the system looking for answers.
Prevent Unauthorised Purchases
For another layer of security, you can use Approval Workflows to make sure all purchases are authorised and correct.
The set up of your approval workflows can be fully customised. You decide which transactions need approval, who needs to approve them, the sequence of approval and which factors determine the appropriate approver.
Approval workflow rule types:
- Specific user or user group – Choose from users or groups with permissions for the entity, department or territory
- Value-based – Approver is determined by the value of the transaction, which can be progressive with each approver required to action, or directly to a single approver
- Role-based – A manager in a specific role, e.g. department manager, employee manager, transaction department manager etc.
This is especially useful if you’ve got multiple staff members requesting quotes or Purchase Orders.
Start Budgeting Smarter, Not Harder
We’ve worked with multiple care homes to migrate to Sage Intacct. If you’d like to find out more about the migration process, read our case study with Gold Care Homes here.
To discuss Sage Intacct for care homes in more detail, complete the enquiry form.
