Have you ever wondered how TransForm is able to manage over half a billion dollars of spend, representing over 200,000 invoices for our member hospitals? It’s no easy feat and requires people who are detail-oriented and organized to say the least. TransForm’s accounts payable department may be small, but it’s mighty when it comes to ensuring all the vendors and physicians for our hospitals are paid correctly and on time month after month.
Accounting Assistant, Grant Sloan was able to provide us a glimpse of exactly how this small department of eight are able to pull off such a vast amount of payments each and every month.
So, what is the accounts payable department responsible for?
Sloan: We pay all the accounts for our hospitals and TransForm. In other words, we pay invoices on behalf of the hospitals and TransForm – everything from band aids, radioactive material, computers and cleaning supplies. This means we complete all the payment transactions for departments like IT, clinical and physician services, x-ray, ortho and surgeries, to name a few. It’s easy to see how we can process over 200,000 invoices a year when you take all that activity into consideration.
How does the team manage all this work?
Sloan: Well, we have to be super organized and streamlined in how we handle these transactions. One employee monitors the accounts payable email inbox and then triages to the rest of the department depending on the need or request.
We used to operate as employees with specific duties or concentration areas, but we underwent an internal process review and all determined that it would be a better and more efficient work flow for both the department and our customers if we work together and share the tasks. This has reduced some of the bottlenecks we were experiencing previously. We work better together as a more cohesive team where we have adopted the philosophy that we’re all accountable for all the invoices that come through instead of them waiting in a queue.
Logistically, this means that once a week we do a process called Cash Requirements. We send a Cash Requirement to each hospital site that informs them of what invoices are due and need to be paid for that week. The sites review their Cash Requirement and provides approval for the invoices to be paid. Each site has the option of taking off or adding on invoices of their choosing. Once they approve their Cash Requirement they send us the total amount to us and we distribute it to the individual vendors for payment.
