Modern finance is more than just numbers — it’s the story those numbers tell. That’s a fact at Life Care Services (LCS), which manages about 150 senior living communities, holds equity stakes in about a third of them, and has a business unit that provides services to senior communities. “The variety of operations and capital structures adds a lot of complexity to our financial consolidation,” says LCS Vice President and Controller Ross Kelderman. “We need to be able to roll up products and services across a wide range of businesses and ownership models to produce consolidated statements that tell a clear story.”
Aging on-premises financial consolidation software wasn’t up to the task. It relied on Visual Basic scripts and manual, technical processes that were a “black box” understood by few people at LCS. While Kelderman sometimes mused that the old system — which he knew inside and out — gave him job security, he also knew that technical busywork made him a potential single point of failure. It also limited his professional mobility within the company. The system was also expensive, a point driven home when IT made plans to shutter the internal data center where it resided. “As we looked at the cost and the competencies required to retain the tool, it became unsustainable,” Kelderman recalls.
Quick deployment delivers rapid returns
The finance team at LCS looked for a consolidation solution they could stand up quickly and that delivered low total cost of ownership. “We considered several cloud providers,” Kelderman says. “Anaplan Consolidation offered by far the lowest cost of initial investment and the quickest implementation.”
In less than four months, Kelderman and his team had all the functionality of their previous tool up and running in Anaplan. They went live a few weeks later, and turned off their old solution for good after a few months.
