Net client growth shouldn’t be the only metric you and your team use to measure business health. A new KPI you should take a look at is efficiency.
Efficiency can be defined in a number of ways, but the way we look at it is, “How much work are you doing?” And “in how much time?”
The idea behind it is not to micromanage or nitpick. The goal is to get a raw, honest answer and see how you can incorporate new resources, tools, technology, and programs that can give your team time back in their work week.
In meeting with registries across the country, of all different sizes, we compiled together a few best practices they use to ensure that their teams are performing with maximum efficiency in mind.
Collate and digitize your billing and pay disbursement processes.
Some registries can spend hours a day reviewing invoices, issuing checks, and auditing their billing systems to ensure that amounts are correct.
Manual processes that take place on paper used to be the norm, however, these can lead to excess time spent on reviewing information with a high likelihood of human error.
By uploading your billing and pay disbursement processes into a digital format, it’s much easier to audit and allocate funds appropriately. Checks and balances are much easier to account for on a computer as opposed to on paper.
According to Quickbooks, the average small business can spend up to 14 hours a week chasing payments. If this is true for your registry, your business might be due for a billing tune-up.
“We were dealing with a lot of checks and invoices. Our team would have to get the timesheet and then convert it to the proper payment amount, and then invoice, and finally mail it out,” shared Lois Kaminsky, Owner of Home Care Options. This created a dynamic where their biller had to audit each entry, fix amounts, and these systems required a lot of hand-holding.
Make sure that you know when to expect each payment, how much it should be for, and how it’ll be accounted for in your bookkeeping system.
Center your operations around compliance.
Compliance isn’t a particularly fun aspect of running a caregiver registry, however, it’s necessary to maintain your unique business model. When you position compliance at the center of what you do, it can streamline decision-making processes by a large margin.
For example, let’s say you have been looking for a new registry management system. With compliance in mind, you can go through a mental checklist of the regulations and best practices you need to adhere to as a shopping list for features.
That could mean maintaining the proper nomenclature or proper field customizations to Electronic Visit Verification (EVV), enabling caregivers to clock in and out of visits as well as visit documentation fields.
Instead of choosing a platform for reason A or B, you can move forward with clarity that the systems, tools, platforms, and resources you use on a daily basis are designed with your business model—and regulations—in mind.
Get scheduling out of your head.
Scheduling can often be an afterthought, especially when you’re in a growth phase in your registry. First you’re only managing one or two clients, it can’t be that bad.
Then fires can arise and then you get a few more clients.
Eventually, it can become too much to manage mentally. Beyond that, what if you need to step away from your desk? Scheduling functions can’t be edited or changed.
Digitizing scheduling and other central processes not only frees you of the mental burden, but it fosters transparency within your admin team. This also makes it easier for caregivers to make the changes they need to make on their own, helping you from a compliance standpoint as well.
“In terms of scheduling, it was being done from memory and mental notes. This made things hard to scale, holding us back from where we should be,” added Kaminsky.
Move your caregiver registry into the digital age with efficiency in mind.
In today’s day and age, artificial intelligence and other innovations are making it easier for your teams to focus on mission-critical work. By leveraging these and other tips, you can enable your team to look for new, faster ways to do tasks that used to soak up a lot of their time.
By training them to identify what tasks hold them up on a day-to-day basis, your team can help you become a growth machine—without even taking on a new client (but you’ll have way more time to do that with the time savings).
How are you equipping your team to be more efficient?
