Douglas “Doug” Neibloom started as Chief Financial Officer with Royal Senior Care in November of 2005. The office environment was visibly rundown with outdated grey cubicles on the second floor of a supermarket strip mall. The company had just acquired its 6th and 7th properties. Each were considerably sized communities of 140 and 202 units, respectively.
The finance team was made up of entry-level employees trying to complete mid-management level work.
Doug Neibloom, Chief Financial Officer
Initially, Doug thought his predecessor had created the issues they were facing. However, he soon discovered that it was a combination of an inexperienced financial leader and an owner who didn’t see the benefit of providing additional resources to creating a centralized accounting department that would cover all three states.
The first challenge was to ease the frustrations of managers and vendors that had not been paid and to update the financials. Managers from the facilities and vendors were constantly calling looking for payments, vendors were threatening not to ship orders unless they were paid in full. And the corporate staff appeared not to be concerned.
Doug needed to tackle three issues: collections, vendor payments and financial reporting. He organized an action plan in two phases.
- Categorize vendors most sensitive to running operations of facilities to be paid in a timely fashion.
- Emphasize collections utilizing current staffing.
- Bring all financials up to date.
- Requested additional staffing and office renovation.
At the approval of the other partner, additional staff was hired: one accountant and two clerks to work in AR/AP. The additional staff freed up time to implement Phase Two, which was restructuring the department and the financial reporting. Doug worked under a time restraint, as an acquisition was occurring to bring on three additional facilities.
During Phase 2, Doug managed the work plan to achieve the following:
- Restructured the payroll to mirror the facilities’ departments Admin, Clinical, Non-clinical, Dietary, Housekeeping, Maintenance and Activities.
- Redesigned the general ledger to also mirror the departments in the facility, allowing for easy consolidation.
- Reconstructed Corporate staff by setting up departments, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, General Ledger and Payroll.
- Wrote policy and procedures for each job function, wrote job descriptions.
- Created a facility schedule for invoicing, vendor payments, etc.
- Created new companies in the operating system with a chart of accounts that reflected the operations of the facility.
- Trained staff to post invoices correctly to the new set of accounts. This created the foundation to run budget vs actuals to track the facilities’ performance.
- Trained accountant to complete the month-end closing timely.
The system changes worked. The Facilities learned how to send the AR/AP and payroll in a timely manner, shrinking the time of closing from over 30 days to less than 10 days. Each facility grew to understand the impact of invoice timing and how it affects the operational flow of Financial Statements, supporting better performance in each facility.
The onboarding of the three new facilities was a success and all future acquisitions were fashioned in the same manner. By controlling the timing of invoicing and scheduling AP and payroll, vendors were being paid ahead of schedule. The credit of the parent company strengthened by consolidating purchasing, allowing for preferred pricing with vendors, obtaining better interest rates with the banks when taking on new loans and refinancing older loans.
It was a great experience the banks and insurance brokers loved working with us since the books were clean and easy to understand.
Watch full video interview below.
Contact Doug Neibloom via LinkedIn or his Career WebFolio.
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