December 9, 2020 – To help its multispecialty dental practice in North Carolina navigate market fluctuations, Village Family Dental turned to the Sage Intacct cloud financial management system to increase profitability and scale from three to 11 offices. Over the past several years, Sage Intacct has supported the multi-entity organization by facilitating visibility into location and provider-specific performance, sped departmental reporting nearly ten-fold, shortened the monthly close cycle by 70 percent, and increased finance team productivity by 25 percent.
Village Family Dental specializes in treating the entire family, including pediatric dentistry, prosthodontics, and oral surgery across 11 locations and three ambulatory surgery centers. To keep up with growing transaction volumes, automate manual data entry, and go paperless, the healthcare group’s finance team decided to upgrade its legacy accounting software to a robust cloud-based solution. After review options on the market, Sage Intacct stood out for its expense allocations, purchasing approvals, and fixed assets tracking capabilities, and as well as the ability to gain more accurate information and consolidated multi-entity reporting.
In particular, Sage Intacct benefitted the practice through:
- Scaling finance efficiently amid significant growth: Even as the organization expanded from three to 14 locations, Sage Intacct’s powerful automation improved finance team efficiency by 25 percent—helping them avoid $350,000 in staffing costs. “Seven years ago, our controller was spending all of her time on manual journal entries and double-entering information from our payroll and patient management software,” said Virginia Jones, chief operating officer at Village Family Dental. “Since adopting Sage Intacct, we’ve integrated our core financial system with several other business systems. Sage Intacct and its marketplace partners gave us the tools we needed to redefine the role of finance from a clerical, historical-focused department to a strategic, forward-thinking partner to the business.”
- Speeding monthly consolidations and departmental reporting: By streamlining tedious tasks like recurring entries, allocations, and intercompany payables and receivables, Sage Intacct shortened the company’s monthly close cycle by 70 percent. “We especially love the system’s consolidation of entities. Between our dental practices, our real estate companies, and our ambulatory surgery centers, I’m able to consolidate statements however I want and it’s very, very easy. I can even do departmental reporting that used to take 10 days in just 10 minutes,” said Jones.
- Uncovering granular profitability insights to maintain gross margin targets: Flexible reporting allows Village Family Dental to track costs and revenues by location, individual provider, service line, or department, giving its leadership new visibility to guide planning. And with her personalized Sage Intacct dashboard, Jones closely monitors a wide range of organizational health indicators—such as cash balances, burn rate, collections per month, and performance versus budget—alongside statistical metrics like total monthly cases, operating room days, and surgery center caseloads.
“Sage Intacct helps us constantly watch our profits per case, per hour, and per chair, and implement creative billing approaches to achieve a 7% increase in gross margins,” said Jones. “The system identifies which offices or service lines are making money (or not), so we can decide which lines of business to expand or reduce. Expanding on pediatrics and operating room cases, as well as reducing certain insurance carriers, has increased revenue by as much as $40,000 per month.”
For more information on the advantages Village Family Dental gained from the use of Sage Intacct, read the full case study here.