Case Study #2Continuous process improvement, Computer technologies and infrastructureSituationThe software used at the dental offices for which BTree consults lacks appropriate audit controls and it is further limited by very basic accounts receivable functions. One specific issue is that anyone entering cash into the system could pocket the money and "back-date" the transaction. With embezzlement, a very real problem in many dental offices and health centers, we were not comfortable with this security issue. The system has no provisions for managing multiple daily deposits. It is designed to produce one deposit report for each day. The system also was not designed to distinguish credit card payments separately from cash and check payments because they were all mixed together on one report. Finally the system prints each entry on the deposit list in a seemingly random order which makes it very time consuming for the staff to reconcile this deposit list printed from the computer to the actual deposit that goes to the bank. HindranceThere was really no quick fix to this problem. No off-the-shelf solution existed and the issue required custom programming that was time consuming to build a suitable solution. ActionsBTree hired a programmer and together we wrote an ad-hoc add-on to the system that keeps track of deposits entered into the system. Every day deposits program is run, it searches the database for all deposits and presents a list of them to be checked off. It can sort them many ways to make reconciling to the actual bank deposit much faster and it separates out credit card deposits which are reconciled separately and automatically uploaded into the accounting software via a batch file process. It also allows for multiple daily deposits. One deposit may be done in the early morning and a separate deposit may be completed later in the afternoon. ResultsThe business has proper audit controls for receiving 4.5 million in annual payments. The staff is much quicker at reconciling the deposits and we have good reporting. At the end of the month it is easy to reconcile the various credit card statements from Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express for each of the four offices because those deposits have automatically been entered in the accounting software. The timesaving, the easy reporting, the audit controls, and the accounting improvements that this project has yielded easily justify the expense of about $5,000.00. EvaluationBTree's clients appreciate that we have actually enhanced this software to be more business appropriate and time efficient. |
Case StudiesCase Study #1Problem Analysis and Strategic Solutions, Continuous Process Improvement Case Study #2Continuous Process Improvement, Computer Technologies and Infrastructure Case Study #3Continuous Process Improvement, Computer Technologies and Infrastructure Case Study #4Problem Analysis and Strategic Solutions, Computer Technologies and Infrastructure Case Study #5Disaster Recovery System Case Study #6Application Development |
