Labor Budget Modeling and Reporting by Staff Class Add Efficiency and Detail to Legacy's Budget Process

Background
Legacy Health System is a not-for-profit hospital system offering inpatient, outpatient, tertiary, and hospice services in Portland, Oregon, which includes six hospitals, and multiple primary clinics with a total of 1,509 licensed beds.  Legacy has been using Alliance Financial Management (AFM) since 1998 and produces and distributes monthly financial and bi-weekly labor productivity reports via the web workstation.  AFM is also used to calculate operating budgets with distribution and input from their 30 client-based work stations and 264 external web users.

The Issue
Legacy identified areas for improvement in their current budget process, hoping to make the process more simplistic and transparent to their users.  Because salaries represented 45% of their expenses, they hoped to gain greater efficiency by focusing on this area.  Historically, Legacy had developed a departmental FTE budget with departmental average wage rates and general variability estimates.  Their goal was to expand this to a staff class FTE budget within departments, with variability based on exemption status.

What was the solution?