Pinnacle Treatment Centers Transforms Workforce Planning with Planful

Pinnacle Treatment Centers provides substance use disorder treatment services to more than 30,000 patients daily across nine states and 140+ facilities. Founded in 2006, the company recently expanded through acquisitions, adding to its finance team’s scope and responsibility.

Relying on spreadsheets made it difficult to keep up with ongoing changes, track allocations across sites, and respond to frequent executive requests for detailed workforce insights. With Planful, Pinnacle automated its workforce planning processes, cut repetitive manual work, and gave facility operators and HR teams the visibility needed to make faster, more confident decisions.

As Pinnacle Treatment Centers grew through acquisitions, its lean FP&A team faced increasing complexity across budgeting, workforce planning, and reporting. With more employees, more pay types, and more facilities to manage, the team spent hours manually building and updating headcount scenarios, often with frequent adjustment requests.

“All of that work was done manually,” said Bobby Nepa, Senior Manager of FP&A. “I spent a lot of time during the budgeting season working and reworking those scenarios literally every two days.”

The complexity of Pinnacle’s workforce structure added even more strain. Some employees worked at a single site, while others split time across multiple facilities and received stipends, bonuses, or other types of compensation. That level of granularity was difficult to model in spreadsheets.

“Our executive leadership team requires a lot of detail in what specific drivers lead to changes in our headcount and wages,” said Bobby. “It was hard to track everything.”

While Excel provided some flexibility, it couldn’t keep up with Pinnacle’s growth. The team needed a more structured way to plan and report — and with the next budgeting cycle only a few months away, time was running out.

With pressure mounting, Pinnacle partnered with Bakerfield Solutions to implement Planful with a fast but smooth rollout. The team adopted Planful’s Workforce Pro solution to replace manual, spreadsheet-driven processes with a more structured, more accurate approach to workforce planning and budgeting.

Workforce Pro allows the team to make employee-level changes directly in the system and allocate staff across sites with precision, something they couldn’t do in previous budgets. It also helps align payroll with budget expectations, build trust across HR and operations, and “cut hours from budgeting and reporting,” according to Bobby.

“We have employees who are working at multiple sites on a normal basis,” explained Bobby. “Workforce Pro gives us the right level of granularity to make sure our payroll allocations are in line with our budget, and that really helps gain trust from our operations team.”

In addition to Workforce Pro, the team relies on Structured Planning for day-to-day reporting and budgeting, and Spotlight for Microsoft 365 to streamline month-end reporting. With Spotlight’s Excel and PowerPoint integrations, Pinnacle can refresh presentations with the latest financial data in seconds and eliminate manual copy-paste and version control issues.

“Planful helps us deliver accurate performance details and turn around reports quickly,” said Yan Leyzerovych, FP&A Analyst. “With our workforce’s complex structure, flexibility is really important, and Planful gives us the flexibility we need.”

Bobby added, “Spotlight is a direct connection between our system and Excel. We can set up the file how we want and just hit refresh. That’s been huge for smoothing out our reporting process.”

With Planful in place, Pinnacle’s FP&A team dramatically reduced the time and effort required for workforce planning, freeing up capacity to focus on more strategic collaboration with operators, HR, and executive leadership.

With Planful, Pinnacle has been able to:

• Save 70+ hours during annual budgeting by reducing meeting time across 140 facilities.
• Save 20+ hours per cycle on compensation and staffing updates.
• Cut 6 hours from month-end reporting by reducing presentation prep from 8 hours to 2.

Using Planful’s Workforce Pro solution, Pinnacle replaced manual workflows with automated updates, real-time data visibility, and flexible modeling that’s purpose-built for complex healthcare staffing. For month-end reporting, the team uses Spotlight for Microsoft 365 to eliminate hours of manual prep.

“It used to take us about eight hours to put together a detailed presentation for month-end,” Bobby explained. “It’s now down to about two hours.”

Yan saw similar time savings: “I used to spend up to 25 hours rebuilding wage bridges (compensation and staffing models) for corporate. With Planful, that’s compressed to just a couple of hours. That allows me to focus on much more important and actionable ways to help the organization.”

Beyond the time savings, Planful helps facility operators better understand their financials and engage more meaningfully in the budgeting process.

“We’ve restructured the conversation because Planful is more of a learning tool for our operators,” said Bobby. “They appreciate that because they can understand why we’re doing what we’re doing on the P&L and what our goals are. Planful gives our operators the information they need to make smart and strategic decisions on their budgets.”

“There are a ton of different things we want to do with Planful,” Bobby concluded. “Our goal is to continue making these processes faster, more accurate, and more detailed.”