This article first appeared on the OneStream blog, written by Stephen Guerra | May 19, 2021
In today’s complex financial and regulatory environment, consolidating disparate financials can be a challenge, especially if you’re working in a university, a hospital, a research center, a healthcare system, or a medical center. And let’s be real, your organization may be all of those together!
Gathering and reporting financials and the numerous multidimensional requirements inherent in these operations can be a daunting task when Finance teams still rely on Excel or inflexible legacy applications. Why? Well, these tools often require a significant monthly time investment from Finance teams just to manage disparate spreadsheets and data. Finance teams are, for instance, often forced to spend time moving and reconciling data and checking reports for accuracy. These low-value tasks ultimately limit the time available to focus on supporting organizational decision-making.
Transform the Financial Close to Lead at Speed
If you’re experiencing similar challenges with spreadsheets or legacy technology platforms while trying to consolidate your financial reporting to meet the requirements of AFR reporting, GASB, fund reporting, management reporting, and audits, then let’s talk! OneStream’s Intelligent Finance platform conquers complexity in the financial close and consolidation process and unleashes Finance teams to lead at speed with insight, speed and confidence.
With OneStream’s multidimensional capability and extensibility, universities, hospitals, research centers, healthcare systems and medical centers experience a platform specially designed for such complex environments. OneStream allows for corporate finance and various operational units to coexist in one application with the flexibility to extend dimensional hierarchies to meet the specific needs of each unit while maintaining organizational level standards and controls.
With OneStream, your organization can plan and report at a level of detail that’s operationally relevant for your unit and for specific financial process. For example, do you need to extend the account hierarchy for one business but stay at a higher level for another? OneStream enables you to do so – all within one application to then produce reports in one unified statement.
This extensibility is also available in any dimension. In other words, with OneStream, you define and configure the dimensions required to support your business needs. Such functionality makes the software application unique to your operations and the way you perform data analyses.
OneStream in Action
The capabilities and efficiencies described above are just a few reasons one of the nation’s premier university medical centers – the Texas-based Research Medical Center (RMC) – decided to migrate to OneStream.
We’re proud of our work with RMC, the challenges we solved together and the value that our technology will bring to not only the RMC but also many other medical centers, hospitals and higher learning institutions over the years to come.
Below is a sampling of additional key attributes of OneStream:
- Data Dimensionality: A unique need for many academic medical centers or hospitals is the ability to slice data, not only within a specific dimension but also congruently by multiple dimensions. As an example, the RMC needed to look at data by operating unit and by function (instruction, research, hospital, etc.). Being able to easily view data broken out this way is a necessity for the medical center, and with OneStream, doing so isn’t a difficult task to achieve.
- Fund Reporting: In addition to the agile data dimensionality requirement, there’s a need to meet fund reporting requirements. These requirements are not only paramount to reporting for university medical centers but also another capability that OneStream provides. The RMC added a user-defined dimension specifically for fund reporting and then added certain rules and capabilities to meet the medical center’s fund reporting needs – all within one unified platform. This agility allows for the data to naturally flow in the process while simultaneously meeting the reporting requirements.
- Data Drilling: The RMC needed the ability to “drill in” and “drill back” (see Figure 1) to the base data coming from the ledger. A direct integration of OneStream to RMC source data, PeopleSoft, enables the medical center’s Finance team to efficiently drill back to the source and automatically load from PeopleSoft multiple times during the close.
Another benefit of OneStream is the data-loading format. Whether from a direct connection to the source or via a data file load, the data is first brought into a “stage area” that’s not loaded into the cube until imported and transformed. This capability streamlines data coming in at a much lower-level of detail prior to consolidating the financial data needed for operational P&L and balance sheets. Using “stage” data empowered the RMC to report on more detailed data that’s usually not residing in a corporate performance management (CPM) system.
And when there’s a need to report at a lower level? Data is contained in the stage location and can be used for reporting from there. With OneStream, the RMC satisfies capital asset reporting from the stage location, which enables the medical center to report on the data while keeping the cube data as consolidated as possible.
Ultimate Value & Outcome
Transitioning to OneStream enabled the RMC to move from using time-consuming manual processes to allowing the technology to guide the close process and automatically consolidate and report financial statements. OneStream Software provides the ultimate value and outcome thanks to automating monthly reporting, AFR reporting and audit financials.
And with that kind of multidimensional capability and extensibility, hospitals, medical centers, research centers and healthcare systems can experience a user-friendly, extensible and unified platform that brings value and efficiency to even the most complex environments.
Learn More
To learn more, view our e-book “Financial Close & Consolidation” solution brief, or contact us for a demonstration.
