How Barber National Institute Saved 540 Hours by Automating Their Budget

In our global survey of 500 finance leaders, we found that 80% of companies are unable to forecast beyond a year, and over 50% cannot see out further than six months. An inability to forecast is particularly challenging for organizations undergoing a growth phase, as they need to make informed decisions on their trajectory. Let’s use Barber National Institute as an example. As the demand for their community services and programs grew, using complex Excel files for budgeting and forecasting became a cumbersome process. Today, we’ll look at how Barber National Institute saved 540 hours by automating their budgeting and forecasting processes with Prophix.

Who is Barber National Institute?

Barber National Institute (Barber) provides community-based services for children and adults with autism, intellectual disabilities, and behavioral health challenges. With such an important mission and responsibility to their community, Barber needed accurate budgeting and timely forecasting to support their growth.

Barber’s Struggle with Budgeting & Forecasting

It became difficult for Barber to trust the accuracy of their spreadsheets, which created risk around properly evaluating future opportunities. An inability to plan for capital expenditures and personnel expenses prevented Barber from ensuring the necessary level of richness in their forecasts. Due to the nature of the industry, Barber needed confidence in their multi-tiered allocations. As well, the finance team needed a scalable solution to hold program managers accountable to their budgets while also providing a better way to analyze with their financials by slicing and dicing their data. Barber National Institute identified a need for a specialized tool for forecasting that would allow them to introduce new programs into their organization and determine the profitability of acquiring new business.

Why Barber Chose Prophix

The finance team at Barber National Institute prioritized finding a Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software that was easy-to-use, had a similar interface to Excel, could report on financial and non-financial data, and forecast revenue rates for their expenses. After evaluating Workday Adaptive and Prophix, Barber chose Prophix for its customer service, flexibility, and affordability.

Automating Barber’s Budgeting & Forecasting Processes

Barber National Institute implemented Prophix to replace Management Reporter and Smart List in their ERP, Microsoft Dynamics GP. By integrating Prophix with Kronos and Carelogic, the finance team can import payroll and revenue data on a weekly, monthly, and annual basis. This data includes various metrics such as client vacancies, home occupancy, capacity, and more. With Prophix, Barber leverages several approaches to budgeting, including zero-based, incremental, top-down, and bottom-up to create their income statement budget. The finance team generates CAPEX, leases, personnel, and revenue from the bottom-up. Detailed personnel planning allows Barber to conduct personnel variance analysis throughout the year. Being able to plan their revenue in fine detail, such as by client and procedure, means they also have complete visibility to compare revenue rates to plan. Finally, Barber conducts productivity planning for their clinical programs with a dedicated and robust model. Automating their budgeting process has saved Barber 360 hours over 22 weeks of their budget season for their budget manager. In addition, they’ve also saved 540 hours over 16 weeks for four accountants and 160 hours for all program and administrative managers. Given the richness and detail of Barber’s budgets, forecasting has never been more trustworthy or relevant. Before Prophix, by the time a forecast was complete, the process took so much time that the data was no longer relevant. Now, Barber can comfortably run profitability forecasts for acquiring new businesses and cost per unit forecasting. Scenario planning and forecasting have allowed Barber to better plan for the impact of increasing salaries and request reimbursement rates by using a cost per unit analysis. Their finance team can easily conduct in-depth wage analysis, giving them greater visibility into their largest expense.

“Prophix has improved every single aspect of our budgeting process. Instead of spending time setting up the budgeting process, we are instead able to better analyze and understand the budget/product that we are producing in conjunction with the program managers.” – Emily Anauo, FP&A Systems Developer, Barber National Institute

Forecasting Growth for Barber National Institute

The finance team at Barber no longer spends hours looking for errors in linked spreadsheets. Instead of managing Excel, their finance team can analyze and better understand the budget they’re producing in conjunction with program managers. On-the-fly forecasting also allows Barber to plan anywhere from one month to five years into the future, depending on the project. Overall, Barber National Institute has saved 8+ hours every month by automating their financial processes and putting efficiencies in place with Prophix. Read Barber National Institute’s journey with Prophix in their case study.