Greater visibility into staffing costs and margins across all service lines
Unlocked flexibility to easily update reporting templates, achieving desired data outputs in as little as 24 hours
Faster decision making thanks to greater line of sight into critical KPIs
The Challenge: Real-Time Planning in a High-Stakes Environment
The senior living industry is rapidly evolving. Since COVID-19, the sector has dealt with labor shortages, cost volatility and new regulatory pressures.
For CC Young, a Continuing Care Retirement Community in Dallas, Texas, adapting to this pace of change meant rethinking how they managed financial data, reporting and decision-making.
Before Vena, CC Young used Clarity for financial reporting. But as CEO Russell Crews puts it, “Clarity had reached its endpoint.” The system couldn’t keep up with their need for speed, flexibility and real-time financial insight. “If we wanted to make real-time changes to input templates or data outputs, it would take a year,” Russell says.
And with occupancy levels consistently near 100% across most of their services—including independent living, memory support and skilled nursing—CC Young needed to remain nimble. The pandemic had also further exposed the limitations of legacy systems, which couldn’t cope with the need for more real-time decision-making.
“During COVID, we had to be extremely cognizant of every expense, every day,” Russell says. “Our expenses were rising while revenues declined, and our financial system couldn’t keep up.”
CC Young needed a platform that could evolve with their business—and quickly. That meant flexible budgeting, dynamic reporting and seamless access to operational data that supported better forecasting and staffing decisions.
That’s when they found Vena.
Faster Decision Making With Dynamic Budgeting, Reporting and Workforce Planning
With Vena, CC Young’s team could instantly adapt budget inputs and formats on the fly—something that wasn’t possible in their prior system.
“We brought over the reports we’d built in Clarity, but also created new, more powerful templates in Vena,” Russell says. “Now we’re better positioned to analyze our most valuable metrics and KPIs.”
What’s more, now when the team wants to make updates to their input templates or data outputs, it’s no longer a painful process. “With Vena, we can make those changes in 24 to 48 hours,” says Russell.
To support the implementation, Russell and his team partnered with Delbridge Solutions—Vena’s trusted services partner and the team behind Vena for Senior Living, a pre-built FP&A solution designed specifically for providers like CC Young.
With deep industry expertise and a library of ready-made templates, logic, and planning models, Delbridge helped CC Young get ramped up with Vena quickly and start seeing value right away. By leveraging the pre-built solution, CC Young gained access to purpose-built reports across service lines, real-time integration of census and labor data, and streamlined processes for budgeting, workforce planning, and capital forecasting.
“We had resources dedicated to every aspect—financial reporting, workforce planning, capital expenditures and budgeting,” he added. “They kept the project on time and on budget, and helped us rapidly deploy.”
The results were immediate. Staffing costs—especially overtime and agency labor—could be closely monitored against census data and care levels. Margins across different service lines became more transparent. And Russell’s team was able to focus more on delivering high-quality care instead of chasing down data.
CC Young’s unique model—combining assisted living, memory support and skilled nursing services in a single building built to the highest code—allows them to shift care levels based on market demand. But doing that effectively requires granular, real-time insight into both labor and financial data.
Looking ahead, CC Young plans to take full advantage of Vena’s integration with Power BI, creating dashboards for real-time visibility and improved collaboration across leadership. “We’ll be able to have discussions more quickly, make better decisions, and move faster as an organization,” Russell adds.
And the team has embraced the change. “If you can love a financial system, they love Vena,” he says. “Especially compared to where we were before, it’s light years ahead.”
Delbridge’s senior living experience helped us configure templates and reports following Vena best practices, making our budgeting and reporting processes much more efficient.”
Russell Crews
CEO, CC Young