Rehabbing financials to tame 100+ instances of QuickBooks

Team Rehabilitation Services (Team Rehab) is a network of 140 therapist-owned outpatient physical therapy clinics in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Georgia. The 20-year-old organization strives for the best outpatient physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy that measurably improves patient outcomes.

We recently had an enlightening conversation with Kimberley Alleman, the company’s finance director, who told us how Sage Intacct has changed the game for Team Rehab by replacing 100+ different instances of Intuit QuickBooks. In a new customer story, she described how the rapidly growing healthcare organization achieved the following results in just a few years:

• Improved finance team efficiency 40%  
• Saved 180+ labor hours per month by automating workflows 
• Supported rapid growth as business grew 20% year-over-year 
• Gained greater confidence in hiring and investment decisions 

The company prioritizes patient satisfaction, outcomes, and referrals well above expenses or cost containment, and hand-in-hand with ensuring happy patients is its focus on Team Rehab’s 1,800 employees. Everyone, from clinic directors to receptionists, has the option to buy into the company and become a stakeholder with a vested interest in the business. This two-pronged strategy is clearly working, since the company has been featured as one of Michigan’s top workplaces for 13 years running. 

That kind of success is no easy feat, especially amidst a pandemic and continued rapid growth. In fact, Team Rehab adds around 20-25 new locations every year. Two years ago, when each clinic had its own separate instance of Intuit QuickBooks, the finance team struggled to do any type of company-wide reporting. 

Wrangling Complexity and Growth 

Not only did five people spend two full days manually consolidating the books and printing individual clinic P&Ls every month, all kinds of other financial processes were cumbersome and tedious as well. “Back then, there were a lot of things that we did in Excel,” remembered Alleman. “I was keying in the P&Ls for every single entity into a massive spreadsheet. I literally went in and typed line-by-line numbers for our financials each month.” 

And as expenses came in through the company’s main entity, the finance team would have to allocate those out to all of the individual clinics that rolled up underneath Team Rehab Services. To do so, they’d log in and out of QuickBooks over and over again to record intercompany journal entries in each clinic’s instance, as well as for the umbrella company. “Staying on our old software just made no sense, given the continuous growth we were expecting,” noted Alleman. “We knew QuickBooks was at risk of crashing at any point, and when we found Sage Intacct, we immediately loved its multi-entity support and automated intercompany capabilities.”  

Eliminating 3+ Weeks of Manual Work Every Month 

Team Rehab’s finance team worked with Sage Intacct consulting partner AltaVista Technology for a full data migration and implementation. Alleman shared, “AltaVista sat down with us and we mapped out a fairly quick timeline. They helped us import our transaction-level detail from all of those QuickBooks instances into Sage Intacct within just five weeks — it was amazing. We went live right on schedule and never looked back.” Thankfully they were well past this transition by the time COVID lockdowns began last year, so everyone was able to easily work from home. Alleman notes that they simply would not have been able to function as a team if they hadn’t had a cloud-based system at that point.

Across the board, Sage Intacct helps the team save more than 180 hours each month, representing a 40% efficiency gain. For example, they’ve automated the entry of Team Rehab’s ~2,700 corporate credit card transactions every month. Rather than spending more than a week’s worth of time recording every item by hand, they now receive a simple export from American Express and can instantly import it into Sage Intacct to reconcile expense details. A similar import from ADP helped speed the process of manually adding each new hire into Sage Intacct for tracking. 

In addition, the team streamlined accounts payable by replacing around 200 paper checks every week with ACH files through Sage Intacct. They got rid of file cabinets full of checks and invoices, and improved the expense reporting and reimbursement process as well. “We used to have people enter their expense reports on an Excel spreadsheet, print that out and attach to paper copies of their receipts, and then send it to our team, who’d enter everything into QuickBooks,” Alleman said. “Our employees like using Nexonia, which is fully integrated with Sage Intacct, because they can now use an app on their phone to capture receipts and everything is processed behind the scenes. That has been a huge time and paper savings.” 

From the Bird’s Eye View to Financial Close-ups 

In addition to these impressive productivity gains, one of the biggest impacts of Team Rehab’s move to Sage Intacct is finally having a top-level view of the whole company in one spot. The CFO, CEO and board now have all of the transparency and visibility they need to steer the business, not just at the clinic level, but across regional groupings or states as well. 

AltaVista helped the finance team use Sage Intacct to set up all of the P&L statements they need, sliced and diced in different ways, including helpful KPIs based on statistical data. Now, each clinic’s financial statement includes a line right below revenue that shows the total number of patient visits, average charge per visit, reimbursement rate per visit, and reimbursement as a percentage of charges for that month. This helps the mentors for each clinic — who bring experience running other profitable clinics — see where each location should put their focus. 

What’s great is that Alleman simply imports clinical and operational data from the company’s patient billing system, and then Sage Intacct automates all of those calculations and feeds the metrics into her reports. She also uses the system to store ownership percentages for each clinic, ensuring that bonuses and profit distributions are paid out accurately. In addition, she built a custom report to track different fixed asset ratios, which the CFO reviews quarterly as part of debt covenants with the bank. 

A Reputation of Responsiveness 

In general, Sage Intacct has improved the finance team’s reputation within the company now that they’re able to respond within 24 hours to any ad hoc request. “Sage Intacct saves us so much time when people have questions about a clinic’s financials, because we have information right at our fingertips. Every year now, our employee survey comes back saying that finance is very responsive,” mentioned Alleman. 

Next up, the company hopes to fully integrate Sage Intacct with its Salesforce, patient billing, and ADP platforms, which should have an even greater impact on overall efficiency.