Scaling a complex nonprofit amidst 50% growth
As a national health benefits provider, UNITE HERE HEALTH’s (UHH) mission is to ensure high quality, affordable healthcare for union workers in the hospitality, food service, and gaming industries. UHH has grown 50% over the past five years through mergers with additional Taft-Hartley Funds across Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Alaska, and Massachusetts. With this expansion came more members, as well as individual reporting requirements for each regional plan unit.
When the organization’s on-premises accounting system was discontinued, its finance team went in search of a solution that could mitigate this complexity, minimize duplicate data entry, and meet UHH’s long-term, mission critical needs. “After comparing Oracle NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Sage Intacct, and Infor, we learned that Sage Intacct was by far the most focused on the fundamentals of accounting and financial reporting,” said Bryan Schmidt, Controller at UNITE HERE HEALTH. “Sage Intacct’s strategy aligned with UHH’s core values to provide online, real time financial insight surrounded by qualified
partners and the ability to deliver substantial innovations every quarter.” Thanks to Sage Intacct’s modern financial management system, UHH has effortlessly scaled as transaction volumes have doubled since 2014 and the number of entities has increased from one to seven in under ten years. The team’s improved efficiency helped speed their monthly close by 40% and eliminated the need to hire additional staff to accommodate growth. UHH is now well prepared to handle increased volumes and enjoys real-time, granular financial visibility across all of its independent plan units, projects, and departments—
empowering managers to quickly respond to changing business dynamics.
best-in-class financial software saves $300,000 annually
“By seamlessly connecting all these applications, we’ve gained bandwidth to scale without having to request more headcount,” shared Schmidt. “Whereas before, I could only spend around 10% of my time on strategic planning or process enhancements, I can now reallocate my time to projects closer to 50%. We’ve also improvedteam morale because people no longer spend their time on mundane tasks, and enjoy the flexibility of working from anywhere due to cloud based systems.”
INTUITIVE FINANCIAL DASHBOARDS DELIVER VITAL INSIGHT
Because it used to be incredibly time consuming for the UHH finance team to compile, format, and deliver reports to stakeholders across the Fund every month, decisionmakers were often working with data that was several weeks old. Now, with dozens of custom dashboards set up in Sage Intacct, any manager can check their department’s financials and drill down to individual transactions to make informed decisions in real time.
Sage Intacct captures the business context of these transactions, so leadership can filter and analyze business performance by various dimensions. For example, the organization can track eligibility rates and cost per member for the first time, and easily view monthly income statements for each independent plan unit, department, location, or project. “At UHH, we want to achieve smart growth, and it’s critical for regional directors to ensure the money coming in for their plan unit is enough to pay for all the costs going out,” said Schmidt. “Sage Intacct gives them the visibility they need to better predict a plan’s surplus or deficit to determine if higher contribution rates are required or a reduction in benefits are in order. All plan units are reported each month with their level of surplus or deficit.
In addition, the team can customize reports in whatever ways trustees want, and present actual income and expenses in Sage Intacct alongside budgeted figures from Adaptive Insights. “With our previous system, my staff would have to spend about 30 days each year reconciling differences to figure out accurate numbers for reporting or ad hoc trustee questions,” remembers Schmidt. “Now, we hit a button in Sage Intacct and it’s done, which means that reports go out to our trustees much faster, and they appreciate the greater transparency.”
