The following is a guest article by Neil Taurins, General Manager of Nonprofit Solutions at MIP Fund Accounting.
You’re busy providing for your community members and beneficiaries, but when’s the last time you took a moment to evaluate your finance team’s efficiency?
Revenue cycle management for healthcare organizations, like physician offices or urgent care centers, is crucial to create a robust and predictable cash flow. As private and public payer rates continue to shrink and your mission-driven healthcare centers provides more care for less reimbursement, ensuring you’re accounting for every dollar is crucial.
Using fund accounting software automates the accounting process, improves your finance team’s efficiency, and allows you to tell your health center’s story through prudent financial management.
From operating funds, to fiscal awards, and grants your practice has many different funds and managing them can be complex. Cloud-based fund accounting software differentiates income sources from private insurers, individual donations, government payers, and grants and loans your organization receives. Keeping these elements separate makes it easily trackable.
If your health center is still tracking funds in multiple databases or using software not equipped with robust reporting or customizable coding, you’re not managing funds efficiently.
Your healthcare center uses its funds for different purposes. From paying providers and staff salaries, to funding capital improvements, or technological investments, relying on fund accounting software makes managing multiple income streams simple. It also allows your team more time for other administrative tasks through automation. Your fund accounting software is there to help make serving your community and accomplishing your mission easier. Cut down timely administrative tasks and make accomplishing your mission the No. 1 priority.
When it comes to telling your health center’s story, comprehensive fund accounting software features a robust suite of reports that you can fully customize to share only the financial data you see fit. Reliable reports that track and show grant donations and spend or philanthropic gifts are crucial to increase donor engagement and show your organization is a good steward of funds.
Fund Accounting in Action
Neosho, Missouri-based ACCESS Family Care CFO Sheila Long used a combination of solutions to manage the community health center’s finances when she first stepped into the role in May 2007. She inherited an underequipped fund accounting solution, and the practice’s previous CFO also used an outside accountant to do straight line depreciation for the fixed assets for the accounting records.
She realized the clinic had outgrown the capabilities of its software. “We had to account and track everything we were doing in multiple spreadsheets,” Long said.
ACCESS needed a flexible solution to create original codes to track funding, awards, and other grants the center applied for.
They researched a variety of solutions before pursuing MIP Fund Accounting. Since they began using MIP in May 2012, they’ve seen a reduction in the time needed for producing reports can now manage nine different segments in their chart of accounts.
Specifically, ACCESS realized great success around grant management. The community health center applied for a $2.4 million loan during the pandemic and received an additional $5 million in COVID-19 grant funds.
“We successfully managed these grants funds and avoided any dual counting of expenditures for these funds,” Long said.
You may never find a magic lamp, but through the magic of fund accounting software your healthcare organization can increase operational efficiency, and dedicate more time to serving patients.
About Neil Taurins
Neil Taurins is the General Manager of Nonprofit Solutions at MIP Fund Accounting®. He has been with the company for more than 12 years and is passionate about working with nonprofits to provide them with solutions to improve efficiency and better help them accomplish their mission.
