Gateway Health has implemented the MAGIQ Performance Suite to meet its financial and labour reporting and budgetary requirements.
Gateway Health is a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee and a registered Community Health Service under the Health Services Act 1988 (Vic).
Gateway Health focuses on the provision of primary health and welfare services to people at highest risk of poor health outcomes.Services are delivered by over 300 staff members at sites in Wodonga, Wangaratta and Myrtleford in Victoria, and through outreach services provided across North East Victoria and Southern NSW.
MAGIQ Performance is a suite of native Cloud budgeting, reporting and planning software designed to help manage complex organisational budgetary and financial plans. Sophisticated reporting and analytics capabilities are provided to meet financial, operational and regulatory reporting requirements.
Gateway Health has implemented MAGIQ Performance across its Microsoft Dynamics GP finance system and Sage Payroll system to deliver significant improvements to its budgetary processes and reporting insights.
Gay Healy, Finance Team Leader at Gateway Health says the key driver for implementing MAGIQ Performance was to improve financial transparency and accountability across the organisation.
“MAGIQ Performance has enabled us to move closer to this goal by providing our Service Stream Managers across all of our locations with access to real-time, accurate and relevant financial data for their service activity. The Finance Team and Budget managers are continuing to evolve the suite of reports and learning how best to interrogate and present the wealth of data available in MAGIQ,” said Gay.
Many of our departmental managers have a non-financial background and MAGIQ Performance allows us to provide relevant financial data in a visually engaging and more easily understood format. This has been helpful in building their financial understanding and supporting future, sound decision-making.”
Gateway Health has completed its first budgetary cycle using MAGIQ Performance. Gay observes this was a much more ‘hands on’ process, with managers able to actively participate in the budgetary process as opposed to the finance team preparing the budget. Managers across the organisation have responded positively to being more involved and are taking greater ownership of their budgets.
“We can see that MAGIQ Performance is providing our Managers with a much clearer view of their financial and budgetary position. This will only improve as we gain a more accurate historical view, which in turn will help the accuracy of our projections going forward.”
Achieving greater visibility over labour costs was another important driver for implementing MAGIQ Performance. Labour costs are typically highly complex and fluid within the healthcare sector. Using MAGIQ Performance, Gateway Health’s Finance Team has begun to be able to provide a more accurate and detailed view of labour costs across the organisations 150 cost centres.
“Labour comprises 75% of our organisational budget so it’s a critical part of the budgetary process. MAGIQ Performance has enabled us to deliver a much clearer picture of our FTE staff costs by cost centre, which is a major advantage.”
Gay has invested significant time to ensure the set-up and configuration of MAGIQ Performance accurately reflects Gateway Health’s organisational and cost centre structures.
“I was very fortunate to have the support of MAGIQ Consultant Ben Sakaio during this time. Ben went above and beyond to help me get things right, which was fantastic,” said Gay.
“Rolling-out the system across the organisation and making sure managers understand what they can achieve does take time, however people are really keen to use the system, which is great.
We produced our first set of reports for the Board using MAGIQ Performance last week and they were happy. I’m confident our use of MAGIQ Performance will continue to improve from here.”