Empower Healthcare Solutions is an Arkansas-based healthcare company offering Medicaid to people with behavioral health or developmental disability diagnoses.
After the 7-year-old company split from its parent company in 2022, Samantha Cassidy, FP&A Lead at the company, made it a priority to get financial reporting, budgeting, and forecasting in order.
The 6-person finance team found themselves navigating a labyrinth of disconnected Excel files and manual processes. “I was doing forecasting and modeling in Excel, with 75 files that didn’t cross-communicate,” Cassidy says.
This manual approach wasn’t just time-consuming; it was a ticking time bomb of potential errors.
Cassidy described their 2024 Budgeting cycle as a disaster. The entirely manual budgeting process led them to miss over $2 Million in line items because of “files and formulas that broke.”
Samantha adds that department heads filling out the budget templates are not finance people and mistakes crept in. Receiving and sharing overly complex Excel templates for them to fill out, without version control, almost always led to confusion, errors, and missing items.
The team also lacked the ability to dive deep into the numbers for comprehensive financial analysis required by executives.
After implementing Datarails, Empower Healthcare’s team saw a transformation in their processes:
“It has saved me so much time. The drill downs have facilitated a lot of analysis that we previously could not do or could only do in slow poke mode.”
Samantha Cassidy, FP&A Lead
Empower Healthcare Solutions
With Datarails’ dynamic ranges and version control, Cassidy is able to trace changes and ensure accuracy making it much easier for department heads to fill out what they need to without potentially catastrophic errors.
“Having that version control allows us to stop having potentially catastrophic mistakes ever happening again.”
Samantha Cassidy, FP&A Lead
Empower Healthcare Solutions
Datarails’ ability to connect different data sources brings added accuracy to the budget versus actuals processes for the team. “We added a field to bring in our vendor codes to see and compare numbers and check which department missed the boat. That is really useful because a lot of that analysis was just impossible before Datarails,” adds Cassidy.
“We can drill down into our PnL and look at expenses by vendor or expenses by department in a way that we just couldn’t before”
Samantha Cassidy, FP&A Lead
Empower Healthcare Solutions
Their previous Accounting system’s drill-down capabilities did not offer the ability to drill deeper into the data.
“I am much better equipped to deliver three versions of a plan.., without having to scramble.”
Samantha Cassidy, FP&A Lead
Empower Healthcare Solutions
Cassidy mentions how Datarails allows everyone to have the custom view they need, while also allowing the finance team to have the global view for higher-level analysis. This is making cross-team efficiency much easier.
“I’m anticipating that budget 2025 is gonna be super smooth. It’s so nice”
Samantha Cassidy, FP&A Lead
Empower Healthcare Solutions