Automating Healthcare Accounting to Deliver Better Outcomes

Automating these time-consuming, transactional tasks can significantly reduce the time spent working in spreadsheets and free your teams to focus on more important activities such as analysis, controls and decision support. But it can be challenging to know where to begin.

To help healthcare organizations identify the top opportunities and make a strong business case for transformation, we recently partnered with BlackLine on a whitepaper, The Shift to Accounting & Finance Automation in Healthcare. The whitepaper breaks down the challenges and potential benefits for automation in three key areas:

• Revenue cycle management
• High-volume transaction reconciliation
• Manual journal entries

Less Time on Mundane Tasks Means More Time for Meaningful Insights

As the whitepaper details, accounting automation has enabled high-performing healthcare organizations to reduce audit time by as much as 400 hours and manual journal entries by 36%.

Improving Reconciliation, Substantiation and Close Management

For example, a leading educational, research and clinical healthcare institution had recently completed a merger and faced multiple finance and accounting challenges. As part of their finance modernization initiative, RGP and BlackLine helped them standardize disparate accounting processes, improve controls, gain efficiencies in their close cycle, and eliminate manual spreadsheet work. As a result, they were able to:

• Eliminate 90% of their reconciliation spreadsheets used in the close
• Improve efficiencies and controls while mitigating risk and reducing errors
• Free up time to focus on value-add tasks while improving user experiences

Automating Manual Journal Entries

In another case, we partnered with BlackLine to empower the accounting team at a large medical device manufacturer to automate their manual, spreadsheet-based journal entry processes and improve efficiency, visibility and control. Nearly 500 entries were posted each month, which drained accounting resources and introduced unnecessary risk of error.

Automation immediately improved efficiency and minimized manual effort, costs, and risks in journal entry processes. The company was able to move all 500+ of its monthly journal entries from Excel to BlackLine’s cloud solution. And in the first month’s close after implementing BlackLine Journal Entry, the company experienced no errors.

Start Making the Shift to Modern F&A

Success stories like these begin by diagnosing key pain points and bottlenecks and treating those first for quick wins. Our Finance Transformation team can help you assess and re-engineer your current processes and make the shift to automation. As a BlackLine Alliance Gold-tier and certified implementation partner, we’ve helped more than 200 clients on over 400 BlackLine projects.