5 ways we can help improve financial efficiency for hospices
With increased demand, reduced government support and tighter budgets, hospices are looking to become more agile in the way they operate to increase efficiencies, reduce costs – and focus more spend on the people they’re there to support.
Improve your hospice's financial efficiency with these 5 strategies:
1. Integrate your systems: integrating back office finance with payroll, fundraising, and ePOS solutions offers huge potential for efficiency. By ‘joining up’ your software, you reduce – and in some cases eliminate – manual processes plus the risk of errors that can often accompany it. Avoid your information sitting in silos so you can easily access the data across your different systems, without manual intervention.
2. Automate financial processes: many processes within the finance function can be simplified or automated, reducing the burden on your finance team. Spend your time producing management information for better decision making. Sign off invoices electronically, and make filling out timesheets and expense claims a breeze. Say goodbye to paper pushing and rekeying of information. Gain back valuable time to better serve the organisation.
3. Better financial reporting: with multiple stakeholders including trustees and budget holders, it’s important that everyone’s kept in the loop. Having the capability to report more easily across every area and activity within the hospice is vital. Being able to carry out analyses from within the system – not spreadsheets – ensure that everyone is working with one set of data. Better data helps to facilitate better decisions.
4. Lower income generation costs: from the running of shops and fundraising events to collecting donations and legacy funds, the breadth of activity undertaken by any hospice is huge. By automating the management of income generation, organisations can avoid high administration overheads. With the right financial software, you can ensure that a higher proportion of funds are spent on providing the best possible care.
5. Grow the cause more quickly: as a hospice grows it can often become just as complex as a larger organisation. Putting the right systems and processes in place from the beginning will help
your organisation to scale in a much more manageable way. It’ll instil good practice in the coming years as the hospice continues to grow – whilst keeping the back office headcount to a minimum.
Discover Access Financials for Hospices
Access Financials & Access Financials Operations has saved us more than 200 hours each month, equating to £50k per year. Process automation and greater control over project reporting and spend means we have more time and resource to share the mission of God and serve communities worldwide; everyone’s benefiting all round.
Since working with Access we’ve seen a massive uptick in people engaging with us and using our services after finding us online which has a great impact on our ability to support the community.
We are really happy with the impact the Access Charity Website platform had for us. Everyone from the Chief Executive down has given great feedback on the site, saying it is far more modern and far more professional. As well as helping support our fundraising, it is also proving to be a service-user tool that is helping us put people in touch with their local Home-Starts when they need support, or when they want to volunteer their time.
After selling out, we’re even taking lots of pre-orders for a second printing run. We have an advantage over other similar charities as our website allows us to do so much.
We can now produce management reports in record time, from compiling all the relevant and correct information to actually completing the report.
This now takes us 3 days for all the different departments within the charity. We wouldn’t have been able to do it this quickly before – it used to take us at least two weeks to complete.
