Greentree update helps GMHBA

Geelong-based GMHBA is Australia’s 12th largest health fund, with revenues in the 2001 year of $77 million and around 55,000 members from all over Australia. With 11 branches across regional Victoria (in addition to a Perth office), the organisation is geared to provide a niche alternative to the larger national health funds.

GMHBA had been a CBA customer for many years and in early 2001 decided to update its financial system. According to Tony Ficca, GMHBA’s Finance Manager and Company Secretary, the organisation spent considerable time reviewing a number of mid-range products before selecting Greentree. With the implementation of a new system it wanted to improve on several key areas, including financial reporting.

“CBA reports, while they were adequate, didn’t allow a lot of flexibility and took quite a long time to process and print. When the reports came out we would have to re-key the values into Excel in the format we wanted,” says Tony.

“Now to get our financial reports directly out of Excel, we just press a button and they are there immediately. The integration between Excel and Greentree is very impressive and our month-end reporting is now much more streamlined.”

GMHBA also took the opportunity with the new system to redesign its chart of accounts, better reflecting its business and reporting structures. A variety of financial reports have been defined in Excel, with live links to the Greentree Database. Reporting is immediate, accurate and real-time; giving all users of the financial reports key data and information regarding the company’s performance in a timely manner.

Most of the GMHBA’s data processing requirements are managed by a specialised application for health funds operating on separate Unix system. Summarised financial information is loaded into a spreadsheet and journals are posted directly to Greentree.

Tony explains, “The main problem we had with CBA was that our figures were all keyed in manually. Using Excel, we have set up a worksheet with the accounts to post to define in a template. We just upload it – it’s fantastic.”

GMHBA went live with Greentree in July 2001 after several months of planning and deciding how to best utilise some of the new features available. Tony says the organisation has reaped a number of additional benefits besides better reporting. “We are doing a lot more now. Previously we were fairly standard in our end-of-month reporting, and now we are doing a lot more reports that are departmentalised and in more detail. The base operating system is also much better – we don’t need to re-index data files and don’t seem to need as much maintenance.”

With rising costs of providing health care combined with an aging population, many health funds are expected to face a number of challenges over the coming years. With a solid financials and reporting system now in place, GMHBA is certainly better prepared to face these future challenges.