Brookline Village
Retirement Community Modernizes Software for Efficiency and Access to Information
Brookline Village offers a continuum of care for retirement living and serves more than 200 residents. The company’s previous accounting system was dated and did not meet the reporting needs of management or auditors. In addition, Brookline office staff could not efficiently provide detailed billing statements to residents and paystubs to employees. When the company deployed new clinical software, it also modernized its accounting and payroll systems with Microsoft Dynamics® GP. Now, the Brookline office staff can provide timely, detailed information to management, auditors, residents, and employees. Staff members also spend less time gathering, storing, and managing information and reduced the number of paper files in storage by 75 percent.
Situation
Located in Central Pennsylvania, Brookline Village has provided quality nursing care and accommodations for elderly residents since 1955. Today, the company offers approximately 200 residents a variety of services through its three operating divisions. These operations range from apartment suites for independent and assisted living to rehabilitation and long-term care.
Although quality of care is the priority at Brookline, the company also relies on computer software to help its office staff do their job efficiently. Brookline used facility management software that ran on the Windows® 95 operating system and printed payroll reports on specialized OKI Data printers. “Our previous software was archaic. The old-fashioned interface and 11-by-17 printouts were quaint, but what really worried me more was that the technology was not well supported,” says Becky Stopper, Office Manager at Brookline Village. “The possibility of the system failing was a significant risk to our operations.”
Because of the limitations of the system, Brookline office staff frequently printed out receipts and records for physical storage. These records required considerable space, needed to be cleared out and disposed of regularly, and required fastidious attention to detail when it came to proper filing.
Moreover, staff found it difficult to create custom reports in the old system. “When we needed to change something in the reports, we would often have to contact the software vendor for help. From my perspective, it seemed like a computer programming exercise each time,” says Stopper. Also, whenever Brookline hired auditors to meet the requirements of its banks, the company invested significant office resources to provide a sufficient level of reporting detail.
The office staff’s limited ability to gather and provide detailed information also affected residents at Brookline, who would often contact the office with questions about their billing statements. Employees sometimes requested clarification about their paystubs, which offered only basic pay information because of the constraints of the payroll system.
When Brookline needed to update its clinical software, the company decided to find new software that would also improve its payables, payroll, and other financial processes. By connecting its clinical and billing software to financial systems, Brookline hoped to improve financial management and provide more detailed, timely information to customers, vendors, and employees.
Solution
Brookline Village investigated several solutions for its financial management needs, but decided on Microsoft Dynamics® GP because of its integration capabilities, ease of configuration, robust functionality, and ease of use. It helped that the company’s sister home care company used Microsoft Dynamics GP and recommended the software. “We didn’t want to be burdened with a variety of financial, payroll, and human resources systems. With Microsoft Dynamics GP, we can capitalize on all these functions in a single package,” says Stopper.
Managing Financials for Three Operating Units
Each of the three operating units at Brookline maintains its own independent financial accounts, but consolidated information is easily accessible through the Chart of Accounts in Microsoft Dynamics GP. “I can put in as much detail as we need in the Chart of Accounts so that our reports have significantly more information in them than with our previous software,” explains Stopper. Brookline can easily create consolidated reports for filing purposes using the cross-company functions in Microsoft Dynamics GP.
Brookline achieved similar consistency when tracking vendors that are shared across operating units. The payables function in Microsoft Dynamics GP gives Brookline an easy way to assign a consistent ID to each vendor.
Gathering Data and Building Reports
With Microsoft Dynamics GP, Brookline managers gain access to consolidated views of the company’s overall financial information, and office employees can easily gather specific details for the company’s management and outside auditors.
SmartList Builder in Microsoft Dynamics GP, shown in Figure 1, is another useful tool to help Brookline office staff compile information for specific purposes. “Recently, I had to prepare some financial information for a grant application. Using the SmartList function in Microsoft Dynamics GP, I created a spreadsheet with the appropriate data in just one afternoon. Before, that task would have easily taken three days,” says Stopper.
Simplifying Payroll and Human Resources
Brookline office staff members use Microsoft Dynamics GP to simplify payroll management and human resources for 225 employees across three operating units. The payroll manager can use the alphabetic lookup to easily find employee records, compared with having to page through multiple screens in the old software. Using the PTO Manager, Brookline human resources staff can easily track accumulated and carried-over time off for different employees based on seniority, and then have those liabilities reflected in the General Ledger in Microsoft Dynamics GP. And, Brookline can use Microsoft Dynamics GP to provide employees with detailed information about their salaries, deductions, and benefits on their paystubs.
“Microsoft Dynamics GP makes it a lot easier for us to meet our residents’ and employees’ expectations in terms of billing and payroll information. When we were dealing with manual data reentry and printouts, we had to answer a lot of questions in person,” says Stopper.
Even though the company has not owned Microsoft Dynamics GP long enough to run its end-of-year process on the new system, the office staff expect the task to be much easier, due to automatically populated W2 forms and downloadable tax tables.
Benefits
Now that the company has deployed Microsoft Dynamics GP, the office team at Brookline Village—the people who run payroll, pay suppliers, and prepare financial statements—operate more efficiently and serve various stakeholders more effectively. This service includes more detailed and timely reports that help management make more informed business decisions, compile comprehensive financial data for smooth audits, and generate complete billing statements that satisfy resident questions. Moreover, the software empowers employees to configure the system to better support how their office operates.
Flexible Software for Accounting and Payroll
Microsoft Dynamics GP is a more flexible software solution than Brookline previously used, enabling the company to configure its systems to its business instead of making its business conform to rigid software rules. The solution integrates easily with other systems, working seamlessly with the clinical and billing solution from Momentum Healthware. Brookline is planning to link Microsoft Dynamics GP with its time-clock system so that office staff no longer have to manually enter time-clock data into the payroll system.
Brookline staff are also taking advantage of the ability to configure the software themselves, such as coordinating SmartLists to track specific data or create custom reports. For example, Brookline managers created a SmartList to track when nurses’ certifications are set to expire.
To streamline the recording of blended overtime for salaried employees, Brookline set up the Payroll module in Microsoft Dynamics GP to automatically calculate additional pay based on number of overtime hours. Before, the person responsible for payroll needed to calculate blended overtime for each salaried employee who worked more than 40 hours.
Fewer Paper Records
Even though Brookline used software systems previously, the office staff still needed to print out and store numerous records and receipts. With Microsoft Dynamics GP, fewer of these printed records are needed, so overall physical record storage requirements are 75 percent less. “I would guess that we can fit an entire year’s worth of files in the filing cabinet now. Before, we would have to archive all the records in the cabinet each quarter,” says Stopper.
Increased Productivity
Staff at Brookline use the familiar interface and intuitive functions in Microsoft Dynamics GP to get things done faster. For example, the person in charge of payroll has reduced the monthly payroll process by at least one day each cycle, and the time spent preparing quarterly reports is roughly a day and a half less.
“With the previous system, the payroll was accurate, but the system was cumbersome and did not accommodate changes. With Microsoft Dynamics GP, we can configure the system to get things done faster and in a way that best suits our needs at that time,” says Stopper. “The way information and functions are presented makes sense to our staff. Microsoft Dynamics GP offers relevant data in a format that looks like what we actually need to file.”
Brookline staff continue to learn new timesaving functions in Microsoft Dynamics GP that make their jobs easier. For example, the person in charge of payroll is able to regularly finish pay-period preparations the day before that data needs to go to the bank. Before, the difficulty of finding information and preparing files frequently meant Brookline would run up against the deadline.
Reliable Support
Brookline benefits from newer software supported by an extensive system of local, trusted partners like Momentum Healthware and Integrity Data. In addition, Microsoft constantly improves the technologies in these solutions through research and development.