Communication Counts

Accounting for Senior Living

By Cutright Elizabeth on Jun 12, 2017 in People

When it comes to the senior living industry, one word reigns supreme: community. Whether it’s memory care, assisted living or simply providing the opportunity to live independently, all manner of senior living options pivot on the notion that residents and their families are keen to sustain connections and keep life in the golden years meaningful and nurturing. One key aspect integral to the creation of a senior community is communication, between staff, caregivers, residents and their families.

“Communication is one of the biggest challenges we face as an industry,” says Dennis McCarthy, CIO at Superior Residences. “In the senior housing market, you are not just serving the resident, you’re serving the family that cares about them as well, so it’s important to ensure everyone stays connected.”

Care, Comfort and Accountability

Florida-based Superior Residences exemplifies the multifaceted nature of the senior living industry, with services ranging from independent living to assisted living and memory care. Superior Residences even provides a Day Stay Program designed to give at home caregivers a break by providing resident care for shorter periods of time from a few hours to the whole day. The company’s mission statement, “building trust so that residents, families and our team have peace” demonstrates Superior Residences commitment to creating an atmosphere of care and comfort based on a set of core values including “integrity, service, efficiency and fun.”

As one of the company’s founders, McCarthy understands the essential role accountability plays in fulfilling those core values, an accountability made all the easier by the company’s use of Yardi Voyager for Senior Housing.

“Billing needs to be as accurate as possible so that you can explain to resident why they are being charged and what services they are being billed for,” he explains. “When you have someone’s daughter or son requesting details, you need to be able to provide them with an accurate accounting of all charges.”

“With Yardi, we can provide all the documentation needed to answer those billing questions,” he continues. “The detail you get from Voyager lets you track almost everything that’s going on in a resident’s account.”

Business (Not) As Usual

Describing the Superior Residences’ portfolio as a collection of “diverse spaces,” McCarthy credits Voyager with allowing the company to unite staff across several locations. Employees stationed in the corporate office or at the company’s communities can all access the same information, allowing staff to work together in a more efficient and effective fashion.

“The ability to track data inputs in real time is by far one of the biggest benefits we’ve experienced,” says McCarthy. “It’s changed the way we do business by giving us a lot of oversight along with robust controls to do the things we need to do when we need to do them.”

McCarthy also points to the ability to create custom reports as another reason Voyager has helped the company streamline its operations. Citing the software’s flexibility and complete accounting capabilities, McCarthy is excited to incorporate Voyager’s spreadsheet reporting in the near future, a move he believes will “reinvigorate what we’re doing.”

“We’ve already reduced paperwork to almost nothing and operate under much tighter processes,” he says. “That streamlining leads to a more economical business model because we no longer need to spend time preparing deposits, and that time saving translates to money savings as well.”

“Every fee a resident has sits on one platform in one database,” McCarthy concludes. “As a result, Yardi’s integrated system overcomes a lot of issues we dealt with in before adopting the Voyager software, and it did this right out of the box.”