Greentree update helps Health Fund

Greentree was the software of choice for one of Australia’s Hospital Benefit Funds, GMHBA Ltd, when it decided to upgrade its CBA Financial system. Streamlined reporting via the ‘impressive’ integration between Greentree and Excel made the decision to change easy...

Geelong based GMHBA is Australia’s 12th largest health fund, with around 55,000 members from all over Australia.

With 11 branches across regional Victoria (in addition to a Perth office), the organisation is geared to provide a niche alternative to the larger national health funds.

GMHBA had been a CBA customer for many years and when the time came to update its financial system GMHBA’s finance manager Tony Ficca says the organisation spent considerable time reviewing a number of mid-range products before selecting Greentree.

He says with the implementation of a new system GMHBA wanted to improve on several key areas, including financial reporting.

“CBA reports, while they were adequate, didn’t allow a lot of flexibility and took quite a long time to process and print. When the reports came out we would have to re-key the values into Excel in the format we wanted,” he says. Now to get financial reports directly out of Excel, Ficca says he just presses a button and they are there immediately.

“The integration between Excel and Greentree is very impressive and our month end reporting is now much more streamlined.”

GMHBA also took the opportunity with the new system to redesign their chart of accounts, better reflecting their business and reporting structures.

A variety of financial reports have been defined in Excel, with live links to the Greentree Database. Reporting is immediate, accurate and real-time; giving all users of the financial reports key data and information regarding the Company’s performance in a timely manner.

The bulk of the GMHBA’s data processing requirements are managed by a specialised application for health funds operating on separate Unix system. Summarised financial information is loaded into a spreadsheet and journals are posted directly to Greentree.

“The main problem we had with CBA,” says Ficca, “was that our figures were all keyed in manually. Using Excel, we have set up a worksheet with the accounts to post to define in a template. We just upload it – its fantastic”.

The organisation went live with Greentree after several months of planning and deciding how to best utilise some of the new features available. Ficca says the organisation has reaped a number of additional benefits besides better reporting.

“We are doing a lot more now. Previously we were fairly standard in our end of month reporting and now we are doing a more reports that are departmentalised and in more detail. The base operating system is also much better – we don’t need to reindex data files and don’t seem to need as much maintenance.”

With rising costs of providing health care combined with an aging population, many Health Funds are expected to face a number of challenges over the coming years. With a solid financials and reporting system now in place, Ficca says GMHBA is certainly better prepared to face these future challenges.

For more information

www.greentree.com/customers/profiles/gmhba.cfm

Graham Hill
(09) 366 3897
graham.hill@greentree.com
www.greentree.com

7/12/11_ex

View Solution Provider