Most senior living financial leaders recognize that manual processes are inefficient, but few have calculated the true cost. Beyond the obvious time investment, manual financial processes create hidden expenses that significantly impact your bottom line. Whether your organization is an Assisted Living Facility (ALF), a Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF), or both, automated processes can help you save time and money by reducing inefficiencies.
Sage Intacct is a leading ERP and is a proven Senior Living Financial Software. Blytheco, a valued Sage Intacct Implementation partner, explores your challenges and has recommendations on streamlining your growth and efficiency.
Consider a typical month-end close process in a community using manual or semi-manual financial systems. The accounting team spends hours collecting data from various sources, entering information from paper invoices, reconciling discrepancies between systems, and creating reports in Excel. A single three-property organization might invest 200+ staff hours monthly in tasks that could be automated.
Healthcare finance efficiency is important. At an average loaded cost of $40 per hour for accounting staff, that's $8,000 monthly or $96,000 annually just in direct labor. Multiply this across larger organizations, and the cost becomes staggering.
Manual data entry has an average error rate of 1-5%. In a community processing 500 invoices monthly, that could mean 5-25 errors requiring correction. Each error requires time to identify, investigate, and correct. Some errors aren't caught until year-end audits, requiring costly adjustments and potential compliance issues.
Duplicate payments, missed discounts, and late payment penalties add up. A single community might lose thousands annually to these preventable errors.
When financial reports take weeks to produce, you're making decisions based on outdated information. By the time you identify a concerning expense trend, it may have persisted for months. When you finally see that occupancy is declining in a particular unit type, you've lost valuable time to respond.
This delayed visibility has a real cost in missed revenue opportunities, delayed cost corrections, and reduced operational agility.
Talented accounting professionals don't want to spend their days on manual data entry and reconciliation. They want to provide strategic insights, improve processes, and contribute meaningfully to the organization's success.
Manual processes lead to job dissatisfaction, burnout, and turnover. The cost of replacing a skilled accounting professional can exceed $30,000 when you factor in recruitment, training, and lost productivity.
Manual processes create compliance vulnerabilities. Missing documentation, inconsistent procedures, lack of audit trails, and difficulty demonstrating controls put your organization at risk. The cost of a failed audit, regulatory penalties, or fraud incident can be catastrophic.
As your organization grows, manual processes don't scale linearly; they scale exponentially. Adding a fourth property might double your administrative burden. Expanding from five to ten communities could make your current processes completely unworkable, forcing a crisis-driven technology implementation instead of a strategic one.
To understand your organization's true cost of manual processes, calculate staff time invested in manual tasks, estimated error rate and correction costs, average time to produce financial reports, staff turnover in accounting roles, and growth limitations from current processes.
The Problem: Most organizations are surprised to discover that manual processes cost 2-3 times what they estimated.
The Solution: Modern cloud-based financial management systems eliminate most manual processes through automation, integration, and intelligent workflows. The investment typically pays for itself within the first year through efficiency gains, error reduction, and staff redeployment to higher-value activities.
Use Blytheco’s ERP Checklist to see if it’s time for your organization to migrate to a new ERP.
If it’s time for you to get more time back and optimize with a modern ERP, check out the Journey to a New ERP, or reach out to solutions@blytheco.com to begin your journey with an ERP built for your industry.
You may also be interested in how Senior Living Technology is Transforming Community Operations.
Sage Intacct Solutions Engineer
Todd has over two decades of experience in marketing, sales, presales, and professional services and held roles as Director of IT and CFO. Throughout his career, he successfully established and developed nine practices from the ground up. This experience equipped him with a proven track record of implementing and managing various accounting and ancillary software solutions, including Sage Intacct. He leverages his vast business and software background to lead companies to successful and efficient solutions.
