Managing financials in post-acute care with Stacy Dobson, CFO, United Methodist Retirement Homes, Inc.

In this episode of the Post-Acute POV, our host, Mauricio Hermosillo, Product Manager for Enterprise Financials at MatrixCare, is joined by Stacy Dobson, CFO, United Methodist Retirement Homes, to discuss the intricacies of managing financials in post-acute care.

Join Mauricio and Stacy as they have a conversation on how using technology to support general ledger, accounts payable, fixed assets, and payroll streamlines processes which saves time and avoids manual work. This episode also presents the importance of working with a technology provider that listens to customers’ needs to provide a user-friendly product. Listen to their discussion below.

Topics discussed during today’s episode:

1. [01:19 – 04:09]: Stacy describes his origin story including his journey at UMRH and relationship with MatrixCare.
2. [04:43 – 06:25]: Next, Stacy shares his experience with our products, specifically Enterprise Financials.
3. [6:39 – 8:51]: Stacy explains how using technology to support general ledger and accounts payable saves his team an immense amount of time.
4. [9:08 – 12:10]: Stacy goes on to describe how the fixed assets and payroll modules help streamline processes and avoid manual work within his organization.
5. [12:39 – 16:20]: Stacy discusses the importance of working with a technology provider that listens to customers’ needs.
6. [17:09 – 19:52]: The pair end the conversation by detailing the value of selecting a user-friendly product and the necessity of using customer feedback in the thought process behind new and improved features.

Resources

• Find out more about United Methodist Retirement Homes: https://www.umrh.org/
• Listen to more episodes of the Post-Acute POV

Transcript

Speaker 1

Hi, and welcome to The Post-Acute Point of View. Our discussion hub for healthcare technology and the out-of-hospital space. Here we talk about the latest news and views on trends and innovation that can impact the way post-acute care providers work.

Speaker 1

And we take a look at how technology can make a difference in today’s changing healthcare landscape in both home-based and facility-based care organizations and the lives of the people they serve. Today, we hear from Navin Gupta, Senior Vice President of Home and Hospice Division for MatrixCare and his special guest. Let’s dive in.

Mauricio Hermosillo

Welcome to another episode of The Post-Acute Point of View podcast. Hi, this is Mauricio Hermosillo. I’m the Product Manager on MatrixCare. And I want to thank you all for joining us today. Today, we have a very special guest, Stacy Dobson, who is currently the CFO at United Methodist Retirement Homes, and he’s here to discuss managing financials in a post-acute care. So with that, let’s get started.

Mauricio Hermosillo

Stacy, thank you so much for being part of this podcast. If you don’t mind, I’ll just throw some softballs. And if you can maybe take us a little bit to the beginning, tell your audience a little bit of your origin story, maybe a little bit of your early career, and maybe what took you to your current position at the UMRH.

Stacy Dobson

Sure, thanks for having me. I started at UMRH in 1997, as a construction accountant. It was shortly after that, that we began working with, what was then, Answers on Demand. [Barris Patillo 00:01:34] was the original principal, and he came and visited us here and sold the product to us. And we had the implementers that were Don Frazier and Erin Sakalo. I’m dating myself there, but… We installed in 1997 and we’ve been using it ever since. Since then, I have become Assistant Controller to Controller and now the CFO for the last 15 years.

Mauricio Hermosillo

Wow. Congratulations on the journey and sticking with us for somewhere around 24 years, which is not a small feat, especially with having to work with the likes of James Goodenough and so on and so forth. I commend you for that one.

Mauricio Hermosillo

So you probably work with, like I said, a lot of people throughout the time. Just for the folks listening, we have close to 71 years of combined experience currently on the Enterprise Financials Team. A lot of those folks have worked with Stacy on and off through the years on the different products. For whatever reason, people like to stick around the company and they’ve been gracious enough to help us with Enterprise Financials and hopefully provide good service. So, that’s outstanding. With that said, if you could share a little bit of what your experience has been working with us in terms of longevity and just overall, anything you would like to share with us.

Stacy Dobson

Yeah, it’s been great. The software from the beginning was much better than what we had. When I started, the guy that closed the general ledger actually had to spend the night in the office, sleep on the couch, and change the big magnetic tapes that were size of pizzas. And now, we press a button and we’re done it just a few seconds. So, it’s come a long ways.

Stacy Dobson

Even the product itself, over the years, has really progressed. One of the things that we like to say is, if the product, at least around here, that you’re not allowed to bad mouth this software. That’s mostly because if the product doesn’t do something, the software doesn’t do something, that doesn’t mean it can’t do it. Over the years, we’ve had lots of opportunities to recommend enhancements and you guys listen and have made those changes. And a lot of the customizations have come from, not only us, but other customers I’m sure, but we were actually on the phone today talking about another enhancement that we just realized existed, that over the last 24 years, we didn’t know existed. So, and we were excited to introduce that to the rest of the staff.

Stacy Dobson

So it’s gone from something that seemed to be more of a DOS-based version into something that’s web-based and web-hosted and much more user-friendly.

Mauricio Hermosillo

Outstanding. Certainly a robust product and a lot to,-

Stacy Dobson

Absolutely.

Mauricio Hermosillo

… To offer. Maybe that’ll take me into my next question. Is there any areas of the software that you use more than others or do you use it in general, quite a bit? I don’t know if you have any examples or want to share with us, maybe capital projects, payroll, because it’s a pretty robust, pretty wide product. So I don’t know if you’d like to share any of the modules you would use the most or what you see most helpful and maybe what has been able to solve some problems or pain points that you’ve had throughout the years.

Stacy Dobson

Sure. We began using it because it was all inclusive. We didn’t necessarily need other software. A lot of the other products at the time didn’t really cover every aspect of the needs that we had as an industry. And so we use just about every module. Me personally, I don’t have to, but focusing on Enterprise Financials, we use accounts payable, we’re in admissions and census a lot. And of course, first and third billing and residential billing, we use capital projects, general ledger, payroll, fixed assets, trust fund. Those are the ones we’re basically in. We use the amortization, retail tracker, and things like that on a monthly, weekly, daily basis. If you want specifics, capital projects is one that we’ve talked about over the years, that doesn’t get a lot of attention, but is one that has really saved us a ton of time.

Stacy Dobson

We began using spreadsheets years ago to track our capital projects with basically typing in the general ledger detail onto a spreadsheet and allocating each line item to a specific project on a different column within that spreadsheet, which over the course of time would be thousands of lines. And we realized that you had a capital projects module that we could use and began using that as opposed to trying to keep everything up with the spreadsheet. And it has been fantastic. We used to have capital projects in four different companies, and now we have merged those four different companies into one single company and are able to utilize one company instead of four to maintain what is currently about 150 open projects.

Mauricio Hermosillo

Wow. And the biggest benefit is the consolidation. You have one single place to look at your information and does that translate into saved man hours, if you will? Headaches, maybe some hours of extra time?

Stacy Dobson

Tons and tons of time. Manually doing a spreadsheet and keying in the GL detail, before you added the ability for us to export the GL detail, we were manually keying that. It’d take hours and hours of time. It makes it easier at audit time to just print a specific project detail, provide that to an auditor, let them hand-select the invoices they want for that project. When it comes time to close that project, we just simply print the detail, pull the invoices, and capitalize that project. Much simpler.

Stacy Dobson

We do use a different accounts payable software that works in conjunction with MatrixCare called CoreCentric. So paperless workflow software for our accounts payable that has a hierarchy tree that allows us to route invoices and go through approval trees and ultimately spits out a report that is imported into MatrixCare that we use the load invoice feature, and it generates the register.

Stacy Dobson

We review the register. It automatically posts to the capital projects, which is why we merged four companies into one company for capital projects. And we export that pay detail out of Matrix Care, back into CoreCentric to show the payment process. What we recently added, and became effective today was, we actually can bring the image as well into MatrixCare, which is amazing. We were able to work with CoreCentric to provide the URL within the import file and now, when we go into MatrixCare and click on a link that’s associated with a specific invoice, we can actually go straight to the image of the invoice on the internet, which is a huge game changer for us.

Mauricio Hermosillo

Yeah, I would think so, especially in this time and age where remote work seems to be more prevalent, whether by choice or not, and having that ability to almost get away from paper and be able to look at images and invoices from wherever you are, I would think that’s a huge boost and the boon for your organization.

Stacy Dobson

Yes, it’s great that MatrixCare can partner with other providers to enhance their own product. And it’s something that we’re very happy with.

Mauricio Hermosillo

Excellent. Very happy to hear that. You mentioned something with the parts of the software modules that sometimes are not necessarily [exploited 00:09:00] or used to their maximum capabilities, if you will. One of them was probably fixed assets. Do you have any experience on how it works for you?

Stacy Dobson

We use a different module for each company and we have upwards of 8,000 assets within one company on the high end and in the corporate office, maybe a couple of hundred. We’ve also used the module to help with maybe amortizing bond issuance costs and other things just to eliminate having to use a spreadsheet or post a journal entry, which has been acceptable in an audit-level and allows us to streamline some of the processes instead of doing manual work. We also utilize the picture aspect of the module and import pictures of the assets and attach them to them, so it’s easier to identify them.

Stacy Dobson

We use RFID tags, radio frequency identification tags, and assign those tags to each asset as the equipment ID number, and that allows us to track them and dispose of them on an easier basis as well.

Mauricio Hermosillo

Oh, very interesting. If I could maybe switch gears a little bit. I think you also use our payroll. Do you have any thoughts or anything you’d like to share with payroll? How many employees you may have and maybe how long you’ve been using it?

Stacy Dobson

We’ll issue about a thousand W2’s at the end of the year, beginning of the year. On a day-to-day basis, we have more around 600 employees. We’ve been using the payroll software since late nineties, maybe the early two thousands. Back in the day, we refuse to pay the bill because the month-end accrual wouldn’t reverse. That’s how long ago it was.

Stacy Dobson

And we get approached weekly, maybe, offering up ADP or some other payroll process or service. And it just doesn’t make sense. The software is seamless. Payroll process for 600 people, running it within four different companies, takes only a few hours. And that’s with some people working on one end and using the time tracker software, which has also been very helpful and it integrates with MatrixCare seamlessly. So we’ve never had a need or a desire to go elsewhere with payroll. We’ve never thought about it.

Stacy Dobson

If there was something that we felt like it couldn’t do, or if we didn’t understand, we’ve always had Judy Samet and Pavlina to help. And they’ve been great and they’ve been around forever. And the beauty of payroll is that they understand that when you need something, you really need it. And they’re Johnny on the spot and, in an emergency, they will call you immediately to help you with that process or that issue that you might be having. So we’ve just never had a problem with it and it does everything we want it to do. And we are very complex with multiple levels of time off and multiple tiers of vesting of the time off, of the group term life function works well when you integrate it with the human resources module, as complex as we are, you were still able to in are still able to handle every need that we’ve had to hat with payroll.

Mauricio Hermosillo

Thanks, Stacy. That’s pretty good and great to hear. What about general ledger? I know this as you compare products or talk about financial suites, that seems to be a given, but recently we’ve developed some new features and added a little bit more capabilities to that. I think you’ve had some opportunity to play around with these. Do you have any thoughts on new features, maybe things that you’ve seen positive or have helped in any way in your organization, around general ledger lately?

Stacy Dobson

I would combine… In my world, now you’re right in my wheelhouse that in my office, when we talk about general ledger. So with general ledger up, in conjunction with that is our ODBCs, open database connections, and another ancillary software that we use in conjunction with MatrixCare, Venom. And so the combination of those three has unlimited power.

Stacy Dobso

You guys are constantly changing and asking and trying to improve the product. I got an email today from Jim about the payroll budgeting process. And I think you were on the call that we talked about how we do payroll in the budget process. And there’s a lot of listening going on about what we need as an end-user, as a client. And you’re responding to that. And so, the standard financial statements, the logic behind that, is very similar to Venom, which is a cube based-software that’s based out of Excel. And it’s super powerful, especially in conjunction with matrix care.

Stacy Dobson

The monthly close has been so much better going through the check process, letting you know if a module is not closed or if your journal entries don’t balance, or if you need to repost. It’s a fool-proof process at this point where it won’t allow you to make a mistake. The Due To/Due From entries we use save us time and help us make sure that we’re not reconciling. I’ve used the software for 24 years, and Judy Samet had told me last month or last year, a shortcut using Due To/Due Froms that have saved me a ton of time because I just didn’t think of it. So we’ve, over the years, have suggested enhancements to that. One of the ones we can’t lay claim to is the paste feature from Excel. We use that a lot when we use our open database connections, which is basically an extraction from AOD into a spreadsheet and the table format.

Stacy Dobso

And then you can access that table using look-ups or summits and generate your own set of roll forwards or reconciliations or whatever you want to use them for. We have literally hundreds of ODBCs that we’re using. We set up our journal entries. If they happen to be on a spreadsheet or reconciliations on a spreadsheet, it generates its own journal entry on that spreadsheet.

Stacy Dobson

And then we can just copy that and paste it into MatrixCare and it will post the journal entry for us. In some cases, over 300 lines on one of our journal entries and in the past, I used to have to keep those, which is why you actually have the copy feature because I was tired of keying 300 lines and asked you if you could add the copy feature. And there, we could just change the amounts. But then somebody smarter than me came up with the idea of using Excel and copying and pasting into that, which has saved us a tremendous amount of time. And it allows us to copy in the comments as well.

Stacy Dobson

And we utilize the comments section in the journal entries to import that into Excel, through the open database connections and utilize that to customize our ODBC connections and what information we may want to extract. So we literally have reconciliations and roll forwards that are automated. They do themselves. All we have to do is refresh them and Excel, utilizing the ODBC, the journal entry comments, and all the features that are available to us through the software.

Mauricio Hermosill

Wow. I can’t believe that you went through all that manual keying effort. I’m just picturing your fingertips just bleeding after a while.

Stacy Dobso

I kid you not. It was over 300 lines. Still is, still is over 300 lines what I believe is a monthly, maybe a quarterly journal entry. So, it saved us a ton of time.

Mauricio Hermosillo

Oh boy. Well, I’m glad it’s working out. And we always certainly appreciate it. And you’ve always been very graceful and willing with your time and the way you guys run your organization. It’s extremely complex. Every time we think we understand what’s going on, you open the kimono, if you will. And we’re like, “Oh, we’re scratching the surface.” Once you walk us through how your organization works and the intricacies and complexities, we’re always just [a gas 00:14:13] of how you keep everything straight and everything working. And it’s certainly gives us a lot of input and ideas and how we can make the product better, but we’re always very thankful for your time and sharing your ideas and your thoughts and how we can improve the product. So, it’s good to hear that we’re able to facilitate, or at least alleviate, some of the pain points that you have to go through.

Stacy Dobson

It’s a great partnership. It really is. And that’s the way I look at it is we’re both out to serve the resident and do that in the most efficient cost effective way we can. And the fact that you’re interested in what we’re interested in shows that you care about the product and about the end result. And it could be a resident, it could be a resident finance committee, it could be a bond holder, it could be a executive director on our end, could be an auditor who used reports straight out of your system.

Stacy Dobson

We don’t have to modify and give them special reports. If they want something, they literally ask for the blank, blank report out of your MatrixCare system. So the product has been customized over the year to make our lives better and make our jobs easier. And we’re very thankful for the continuous relationship and really the continuous personnel that you’ve kept. And that just speaks volumes for your corporation of what it’s like to work there and the dedication that you have on your end. I know that we work with Jim and Judy for close to 20 years and others as well.

Mauricio Hermosillo

Yeah, we certainly are a good bunch of people and very dedicated. Everybody wants to see our clients succeed and make your lives easier. And then just, yeah, certainly take a lot of pride on the product and the work. And we’re always very happy when you guys are happy and that… Like I said, it’s a partnership of collaboration and when we’re all firing on all cylinders, we can come up with some pretty neat things.

Mauricio Hermosillo

Stacy, is there anything else you would like to add? Anything that comes to mind? We’ve helped in any way, whether it’s a huge pain point or just in general how technology has helped you maybe advance your organization’s mission, right? Maybe, hopefully we give you on your staff a little more time to focus on more important things. If you have any thoughts around that, if not, that’s okay as well. I think you’ve been extremely gracious with your feedback and your time with us so far. So I’ll leave it at that for now.

Stacy Dobson

I would say that it’s just great to work with a product that’s so user-friendly. I don’t think there’s any product out there that’s better. I know you’re the leader in your industry. And then the one thing we’re looking at now that we planned to speak with you in the future, what seems to be trending is RPA, which is Robotic Process Automation, which allows you to work with an outside vendor. That’s another thing we’re looking at that we hope to discuss with you in the future. So we’re very pleased with the product, had no intention of building anywhere else and look forward to many, many more years with MatrixCare.

Mauricio Hermosillo

Absolutely. The future is bright and exciting. There’s a lot left for us to explore, and we certainly look to this continued partnership. And Stacy, I just want to thank you for your time. You’ve been, again, very kind with your feedback and taking time out of your day to speak to me. With this, I would like to thank everybody for joining us for another episode of the Post-Acute Point of View podcast. We had a great topic, managing financials and post-acute care. And I want to thank Stacy again, for sharing his insights with us. And we’d like to thank everybody.

Speaker 1

That concludes the latest episode of the Post-Acute Point of View from MatrixCare. We have a lot of guests and topics coming up that you won’t want to miss, so be sure to subscribe. If you’ve enjoyed today’s podcast, and if you have a topic you’d like us to discuss, leave us a review. To learn more about MatrixCare and our solutions and services, visit matrixcare.com. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Thank you for listening. Be well, and we’ll see you next time.