Forecasting Growth for Barber National Institute
Key results snapshot
Reduced budgeting timeline by 360 hours, while freeing up 540 hours and over 160 hours for Barber’s accountants and administrative managers
Profitability scenarios that once took 3 days now take just a few hours, with overnight runs delivering daily updates during budget season.
Weekly productivity reports that took 1 week now run in 15 minutes, allowing more time for data analysis and decision-making.
On-the-fly forecasting has enabled Barber to plan anywhere from one month to five years into the future.
Who is Barber National Institute?
Barber National Institute was founded in 1952 by Erie educator Dr. Gertrude Barber to provide community-based services for children and adults with autism and intellectual disabilities. Today, the multi-faceted organization serves more than 6,200 individuals annually with a wide range of educational, vocational, residential, and behavioral health programs. Services range from early intervention for infants and toddlers, an approved private school, job training and placement, residential options including group homes, inhome services, and specialized therapies. The organization also provides education and training to educators and professionals around the world. In addition to the main campus in Erie, PA, the Barber Institute provides services in Northwestern Pennsylvania and in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh regions.
Business challenges
As demand for Barber National Institute’s community services and programs grew, using complex Excel files for budgeting became a cumbersome process. It was difficult to trust the accuracy of their spreadsheets, which created risk around properly evaluating future opportunities. An inability to plan for capital expenditures, as well as personnel expenses, prevented Barber from ensuring the necessary level of richness in their forecasts.
Applications deployed
Prophix One Financial Planning & Analysis
System integrations
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
Why Prophix®
The finance team at Barber National Institute prioritized finding a Financial Performance Management (FPM) solution that was easy-to-use, had a similar interface to Excel, could report on financial and nonfinancial data, and forecast revenue rates for their expenses. After evaluating Workday Adaptive and Prophix, Barber chose Prophix for its customer service, flexibility, and affordability
Key results
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. CAPEX, leases, personnel, and revenue are generated from the bottom-up. Their finance team 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.
Given the richness and detail of Barber’s budgets, forecasting has never been more trustworthy or relevant. The process of completing a forecast used to take so much time that the data was no longer relevant.
Before Prophix, the finance team had to spend at least three days preparing a profitability scenario and then had to upload it into their ERP to analyze the data in Management Reporter. Now, they can create a profitability scenario in a couple of hours. The finance team runs scenarios overnight so managers can have an updated report every morning during budget season.
Improved scenario planning and forecasting have also 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.
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.
Lastly, the finance team at Barber National Institute also leverages Prophix for internal reporting. They report on financial and non-financial metrics, including average wages, vacant beds, occupancy, program capacity, variances, cost per unit analysis, and more. By automating their reporting, Barber can spend more time understanding their data rather than gathering it from across the organization.
Prophix One™ enables Barber National Institute to:
Automate their budgeting process, saving 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.
Produce on-the-fly forecasting also allows Barber to plan anywhere from one month to five years into the future, depending on the project.
Spend 15 minutes to run automated weekly productivity reports that used to take program managers one week to produce
Track net income, 14-month trends, budget vs. actual variance analysis, occupancy, capacity planning, productivity planning, and cost per unit analysis by utilizing dashboards thereby gaining a better view of the big picture while being able to drill into the details behind their financial and non-financial data.
Save 8+ hours every month by automating their financial processes and putting efficiencies in place with Prophix.
in action
