Innovetive Petcare Uses Planful to Deliver Real-time Financial Insights Across 80+ Locations

Innovetive Petcare owns and operates nearly 100 veterinary practices nationwide, providing centralized tools, resources, and support so its veterinarians can focus on delivering exceptional patient care. As its network of practices expanded by more than 500% over just a few years, the friction of manual processes hindered the company’s finance and accounting teams from scaling along with the business. But, once Innovetive Petcare found Planful, those teams were able to cut days off processes and quickly get critical financial insights out to decision-makers across the business.

Innovetive Petcare grew quickly, expanding nearly six-fold in less than five years through a combination of M&A and organic growth. That growth strained Finance and Accounting as they worked manually across hundreds of spreadsheets for monthly close and consolidation, budgeting, and management reporting.

“Our big vision is that we want to use technology and automation to scale finance and accounting to better support the business,” said Brittany Lopez, VP, Accounting at Innovetive Petcare. “Scalability is key for us as we’re regularly integrating new practices and want to retain their individuality. Our team customizes our offerings to give the practices what they need to grow and prosper.”

With each of its 80-plus practices running a distinct system to manage revenue, patient visits, provider information, and more, this created an unsustainable burden on the finance and accounting teams to manually collect, aggregate, and report on consolidated information. With some practices running multiple clinics, and each clinic running as a discrete business, the data challenges continued to grow.

“We had a really hard time getting data out of their various systems and centralizing it,” Brittany said. “We were budgeting in Excel using one consolidated file with over 400 tabs for 80-plus practices and a dozen corporate departments. We experienced ongoing challenges when sharing and maintaining the integrity of the data. We really needed more controls, more consistency, and an easier way to consolidate budget inputs and share financial insights.”

Brittany and the team evaluated a variety of financial performance management solutions and shortlisted two solutions: a finance/HR ERP system and Planful. They quickly selected Planful based on its combination of simplicity and robust capabilities.

“Most of the other tools didn’t appear to be designed for multi-location environments and the complexity that we have,” Brittany explained. “We have 80-plus practices and growing. What stood out the most about Planful was that it was extremely intuitive and user-friendly for building a foundation, customizing it, and creating reports on the fly.”

Innovetive Petcare, working with Planful partner Formos Consulting, was encouraged by Planful’s fast deployment and that it is a finance-owned platform, which enabled the company to manage the solution with just one dedicated in-house resource. Planful for Microsoft Office also provided a quick and easy way to deliver board books customized to internal stakeholders and external investors.

“We were in the Planful system on day one,” Brittany added. “We quickly loaded data and were running reports within a couple of days, and then we ran our annual budgeting cycle in Planful just two months later.”

With Planful’s integrated, automated, purpose-built financial performance management platform, Innovetive Petcare cut days from its monthly close and reporting processes. Planful for Microsoft Office further helped Brittany and the team streamline management reporting and board book creation from days to mere hours.

“Our management reporting packages would take two days to prepare each month, given the different requirements of the business,” explained Brittany. “Planful let us automate that process, and now it takes just two to three hours.”

But getting financial insights out to decision makers isn’t just a monthly exercise at Innovetive Petcare since those hospital leaders need real-time data to keep up with its fast-growing business. Where the team used to run reports manually, combine them into a central file, and email them to each clinic, now they rely on Planful dashboards and automated reports to get the information out instantly.

“We’re able to automate generating the financial statements for our operations team and have the option to have them use Planful to run reports themselves,” Brittany added. “What used to take one-and-a-half or two days now takes less than a half-day. Everyone gets the information they need to make better decisions about their practice and how to adjust to conditions.”

Innovetive Petcare is also using Planful to drive payroll insights out to the clinics and operations teams since that’s a significant component of the clinical cost structure.

“Planful lets us customize the reports so practice managers can see payroll information by department, see their OpEx, see G&A,” continued Brittany. “The format of the report is a lot more intuitive and informative, so they can quickly use that information. Since we’ve moved to Planful, we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on the reporting because the reports are in a more robust, management-style format that’s easier to digest for non-financial users.”

Now, the finance team is building even more dashboards in Planful to shed light on productivity, actuals versus budget, actuals trending over time, key performance metrics, and more. Access to this type of detailed data is “huge” for the company’s hospital leadership and management teams, as is the fast, easy access to the GAAP, lender-specific, and other required reports. Planful even makes it easier to fulfill requests for ad hoc reports and analysis and compare current versus pre-partnership data across clinics.

“We love Planful,” Brittany concluded. “There are a couple of times a week where we say, ‘Oh, we just love this tool,’ because we’ve felt the pain of doing all this manually.”

For those looking to eliminate the friction of manual and spreadsheet-based financial processes, Brittany offered tips on her experiences with Planful.

• Don’t wait! You don’t have to deal with the frustration and wasted effort manual processes consume. Make your move to a modern financial performance management solution so you can save time and money and get more done.
• Use dashboards to convey real-time information in a clear, concise, and visual way. It’s easier for those in the business to digest and creates a data-driven culture focused on reaching peak financial performance.
• Talk with other Planful customers and work with a Planful partner. Brittany connected with others in the veterinary industry already using Planful and heard only “really positive feedback.” Planful has over 1,500 customers of all sizes, industries, and global regions. Plus, Formos Consulting has extensive experience transforming FP&A at private equity-backed organizations.