Jacobus Consulting is a leading healthcare consulting firm that works with hospitals and health systems in North America and Europe. With hundreds of consultants working with clients weekly, Jacobus wanted a solution to help simplify their complex invoicing process.

In the latest edition of our AppExchange Connected Leaders series, we talk to Alan Hall, Senior Vice President of Information Technology, HIPAA Compliance, & Security, about how Jacobus used the FinancialForce for Accounting app in conjunction with their Salesforce CRM to streamline the process, freeing up time and resources allowing the whole Jacobus team to focus on bigger-picture initiatives.  

Salesforce: Can you give us a quick overview of what Jacobus Consulting does?

Alan Hall: We’re a mid-sized healthcare consulting firm that helps hospitals, healthcare systems, and allied health professionals transform patient care and quality, optimize health IT and business operations, and maximize financial performance. We service a range of healthcare providers from large healthcare systems to physician groups and rural access hospitals. Our services help solve a variety of needs from interim staffing to total implementation and transformations of clinical, IT, and financial systems.

SF: Tell us a little about the challenges Jacobus faced.

AH: We have 130 consultants who work on-site at healthcare facilities across the globe, in the U.S., Canada, Ireland, and the UK. At Jacobus, we work very hard to provide transparency to our clients on everything we do. Before we went over to the ERP, our consultants would turn in hundreds of time cards every week along with hundreds of emails; and the same went for expense reports. Because of our transparent processes, we were printing everything to provide documentation to our customers. It took almost four days every week just to get invoices out—and that didn’t include any other kind of support, like for HR or Operations. It just got to be so time consuming that we had to figure out how to automate things, so we turned to the AppExchange and FinancialForce.com to help.

SF: How did that decision change the game for Jacobus?

AH: We’ve cut the amount of time it takes to process all of our invoices and expense reports in half and, in the process, we’ve freed up time and resources to work on other critical things.

SF: What else can you do now that you couldn’t do before?

AH: We spend less time on back-office activities and more time helping customers find new solutions while extending meaningful engagements, plus we get more time with our consultants. We also have a better look forward, meaning we can move with the market and the changing environment much more quickly than before now that we have the agility to keep on top of what’s happening. It’s also allowed me to get back into an IT thought leadership position, helping me solve problems in ways I didn’t have time for before.

SF: Can you give us a few key tips you’d offer to any company in search of a similar solution?

AH: 1. Don’t be afraid of your own DNA. If you’ve always worked on a cloud-based system, you shouldn’t be afraid to do your ERP the same way.

2. Leverage the platform and use your system. One of the things we guide our clients to practice is “use your system,” so we wanted to practice what we preach. We were already using the Salesforce CRM; being able to use FinancialForce Accounting with it and having the benefit of a unified data system with all our information in one place was huge. Now Accounting has the same real-time info as Sales. The FinancialForce app offered a real-time, single view of the customer. That was key for us.

3. Be realistic with timelines. Make sure to communicate all your details and needs at the beginning of the project so there are no surprises.

It was hard to imagine how much time we were going to gain, but now we can see how this has affected other things besides invoicing: there are different kinds of leadership decisions taking place and it has opened up communication between consulting teams and our people in the back office. That’s been key for us as well.

The AppExchange Connected Leaders Series features conversations with forward-thinking, Salesforce customers and leaders in their fields who solved a complex business challenge with an AppExchange app.