Overview

pTalix is at the forefront of helping the healthcare industry transition from fee-for-service models to value-based care tied to patient health outcomes. Its cloud-based risk adjustment solutions equip U.S. healthcare insurers and providers to use complex patient data to improve the accuracy and speed of claims, eliminating error-prone manual work in a heavily regulated environment./p pThe fast-growth SaaS vendor, based in San Francisco, saw revenue leap 200 percent in 2018, two years after it was spun off by Healthline, a consumer-oriented healthcare information provider. The 50-person company continues to scale rapidly with a robust and sophisticated financial management and planning system put together by Ashmi Shah, its talented and progressive SVP of Finance./p

Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

pShah has led Talix’s finance transformation journey since joining the company in mid-2016. Back then, the company relied on a combination of QuickBooks and Excel, though it also had access to Sage Intacct, which had been licensed by Healthline before the Talix spinoff. It was up to Shah to put Sage Intacct into full production and start eliminating the inefficiencies and limited visibility the company had experienced with its previous set-up./p pShah had three focal areas for the transformation:/p ol liDeep reporting to support data-driven decisions,/li liTracking profitability and other key metrics at highly granular line of business and product levels, and/li liStreamlining multi-element revenue recognition processes and other aspects of accounting./li /ol

The Solution

pSage Intacct proved to be the ideal solution to meet Shah’s three key goals. She noted: “Using Excel spreadsheets, especially if you have multiple revenue components, is hours of work and it’s very easy to make mistakes. When I started, we were barely able to make a three-week close and were not tracking things at a deep level. Now we’re down to a four-day close covering all types of granularities.”/p pWith sound accounting in place via Sage Intacct, Shah then brought in Adaptive Insights for budgeting, financial planning, and analysis (FPA), stepping up from forecast models she previously built in brittle, 20-tab Excel spreadsheets./p

The results

pPreviously, tracking deferred revenue and recognizing revenue would take four days a month — that’s been reduced to one day. Once-manual billing processes are now automated through Sage Intacct, reducing what had been 4-5 days of work to a half-day, while giving Talix flexibility to accommodate complex billing schedules./p pWith key accounting processes streamlined and automated, the team can now focus on in-depth reporting to support business decisions around RD, marketing spend, and product direction. For example, deep analytics showed that a line of business the company had considered eliminating was actually profitable. Noted Shah: “I love how Sage Intacct dimensions give us the granularity to track revenue and expenses in many ways, which lets us understand profitability at both business line and product levels. Slicing and dicing data at the level of detail we want has been extremely important.”/p pFurthermore, the combination of Sage Intacct and Adaptive Insights helps Shah drill into KPIs such as churn, annual recurring revenue (ARR), lifetime value (LTV), and customer acquisition costs (CAC). The ability to track those metrics in real-time has also been invaluable in securing investor funding, including a Series B round in 2018. “We vetted our forecast models to some VCs and they were amazed at the level of detail, our agility in the models, and the credibility of how it came together,” Shah said./p

Metrics

pIn addition to the metrics shared previously, Talix also cut days sales outstanding (DSO) dramatically – going from five months to just 45 days. This generated new cash flow that provided the company with $3 million in unanticipated cash at the end of 2018 to use towards strategic projects. In addition, highly granular data in Sage Intacct provides depth and flexibility for Shah to build out five-year “ground up” forecasts in Adaptive Insights based on customer success, sales, product, and other key business drivers. Forecast updates that previously took 10 days in Excel are now complete in hours./p pWith Sage Intacct, Talix has slashed its monthly close process from three weeks down to just 4 days. That level of time savings has empowered Shah’s team to move beyond routine accounting and expand their use of the data for analysis and decision making. “Being able to focus my team on priority initiatives and strategic analysis outside of the day-to-day accounting close, especially with a lean three-person team, is very crucial to our success,” Shah said./p

The Technology

pTalix replaced a combination of QuickBooks and Excel spreadsheets with Sage Intacct and Adaptive Insights.  Shah calls it a “perfect marriage” of a best-in-class cloud financial management platform with the power of a modern budgeting, planning, and forecasting solution./p

Disruptive Factor

pShah feels the key to making good business decisions is access to robust data. The combination of Sage Intacct and Adaptive Insights put incredible amounts of data at her fingertips. Shah noted: “I can integrate our Sage Intacct actuals into Adaptive Insights in less than half a day, and it’s very granular so we have an explanation to the dollar on every line item in my PL,” Shah said. “Having that level of detail is extremely helpful in building up the forecast and budgets, and for ensuring we can make data-driven decisions.”/p

Shining Moment

pEven as Talix delves deeply into financial data to help drive business growth, it has maintained a lean three-person finance team. “I like to think of myself as a modern finance executive who is always looking for better and more efficient ways to do things using software,” Shah said. “My job is to run a well-oiled financial machine to prove out and scale our business model. The perfect marriage of Sage Intacct and Adaptive Insights allows me to reach that goal.”/p