General Ledger Explorer
Quickly organize, summarize, and investigate traditional general-ledger data| Type: | Analytic Accelerator | Status: | Analytic Services | Revised: | 2019-Jun-21 | ||
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| Team: | Financial Support |
Technical Description
The General Ledger Explorer analytic accelerator allows users to quickly organize, summarize, and investigate traditional general-ledger data (actual and budget) to see and understand variances and take action as needed to improve financial performance.
Note that this application, like all Health Catalyst analytic accelerators, is implemented in a custom way; organizations identify their own areas of focus, process aims, and outcome goals. For this reason, the appearance and functionality of the application may differ from what is presented here.
The General Ledger application provides a single source of truth to identify and analyze financial performance and support sound management decisions.
Background & Problem Summary
To make informed decisions about employee productivity, supply utilization, and other areas that have a direct impact on a hospital’s bottom line, leaders need quick access to a blend of financial and operational data. Yet, these data types are often housed in separate subsystems—creating a challenge to pull together accurate data, analyze budget performance variances, and share results efficiently to guide decisions.
Accelerator Overview
Quickly organize, summarize, and investigate traditional general-ledger data
General Ledger Explorer provides actionable visualizations of general ledger data (actual and budget) and an interactive variance analysis feature that allows users to identify major variances within the cost center hierarchy and account hierarchy. The result? Users have easy access to timely, accurate financial data for better insight and wiser management.
Benefits and Features
- Access a single, shareable source of truth. High-level financial and operational performance measures are combined in a predictable and consistent manner—ensuring that stakeholders can review the same data and access the same insight.
- Understand the drivers of financial performance. The application gives users ample means to explore the data. Guided navigation and drill-down capabilities provide answers to the series of questions typically asked, and embedded variance analysis makes it easy to zoom in on major contributors to variance.
- Review the latest data, for the best decisions. The General Ledger application can be set to automatic refresh as new data is available, allowing users make timely management decisions to help meet budget expense targets.
Intended Users
- Financial leadership
- Cost-center leadership and management
- Finance and accounting staff
Use Cases
One hospital system’s leadership and operational managers had become increasingly frustrated by their inability to get timely data or access an accurate view of their current variances; as in many systems, their data collection and analysis was a manual process requiring coordination across multiple departments and systems. By implementing General Ledger Explorer, these leaders gained access to integrated financial and operational data as soon as it became available—and the ability to conduct reliable and timely trend and performance-variance analysis. These leaders can now identify issues much sooner, drill down to understand the cause of a variance, and take corrective action.
Data Sources
This product may leverage one or more of the following sources:
| Primary: | Finance/Costing | See data sources of this type |
Additional Data Source Information
Data comes from your organization’s general ledger or budget tool. The application is organized around the standard financial statement, including Income Statement measures calculated at various dimensions of the data (time, cost-center hierarchy, and account hierarchy).
Financial subsystems—such as Payroll and Accounts Payable/Receivable—may also be brought in. Data may also include statistics (e.g., patient days, procedures) and labor measures (work hours, paid hours, PTO, etc.).
DOS Marts
- Financial
Modalities:
- QlikView
- Tableau
Key Measures
- Revenue and expenses
- Budget variances
- Key ratios
- Margin
Success Stories
Additional Screen Shots
