Canford Healthcare Optimises Occupancy Mix and Profitability With Vena Insights

Improved budget accuracy thanks to integrations eliminating manual data entry

Enhanced profitability through ease of visibility into occupancy data

Care home managers have real-time views into financial performance

The Challenge: Finding an FP&A System to Match U.K. Care Home Business Complexities

Canford Healthcare, with 11 locations across the southeast of England, provides compassionate care for seniors and people with special medical needs. But behind the scenes, Chief Financial Officer Stephen Bates was grappling with financial reporting challenges that made it difficult for the company to carry out the level of detailed planning it needed.

"We were dissatisfied with the monthly financial reporting we were getting from our accounting software," he says.

For Canford Healthcare, this wasn't just about numbers on a spreadsheet. U.K. care homes rely on a complex blend of funding, with a mix of private, National Healthcare System (NHS), and local authority-funded residents, each with different fee structures.

Segmenting customers and drilling deeper for insights from each segment is critical to the company's financial health. After discovering that most FP&A solutions could not cater to Canford Healthcare's unique needs related to occupancy planning, Vena partner Candura proposed a solution.

"It was the creativity of the Candura team saying, 'look, why don't you use [Vena] for this' that was a significant benefit to me," Stephen says. This find set the stage for a transformation in the team's FP&A processes.

A smiling elderly woman with short grey hair wearing a green sweater

Canford Gains 20/20 Vision With Vena Insights

With Vena in place, one of the most significant improvements for Canford Healthcare has been the finance team's ability to analyse occupancy trends and fee structures across different funding types.

Stephen offers an example. "We could see with a particular care home that the lower average weekly fee payers (a customer segment) were increasing their occupancy and the higher average weekly fee payers were actually reducing their occupancy," he says. This level of granular insight allows Stephen and the team to quickly adjust their strategies, ensuring optimal profitability across all the care homes.

Vena Insights, in particular, has transformed Canford Healthcare’s approach to data analysis and decision-making. "We shared Vena Insights with all of our home managers," Stephen says. "I felt that it was quite important for the home managers to access the data themselves."

This direct access to data has not only empowered care home managers to make more informed decisions, but also reduced the manual work for Stephen’s team involved in distributing reports. As he explains, "On their monthly calls with the home manager to talk about performance, my team can look at the live Insights data rather than looking at a screenshot that they saved."

The result has been a marked improvement in operational staff’s decision making across the group's 11 care homes. With real-time access to performance data and occupancy insights, home managers can respond more quickly to changes and make data-driven decisions. This flexibility not only positions Canford Healthcare to stay ahead of changes, but empowers them to continue providing premium care to their residents.