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GoldCare Makes New Zealand Debut a Golden Story

This article appeared in the March 2003 GoldDust.

In August 2002, ElderCare New Zealand Limited went live with GoldCare Resident Billing, Trust and Resident Profiles software. The company has 11 sites, 550 employees and 514 residents.

Prior to implementing GoldCare, ElderCare had been using a customized product that was not performing well and causing a considerable amount of stress and extra work.

Somesh Eladchumanar, Company Accountant for ElderCare, explained: "In our old system, all billings and receipts went into one ledger regardless of the fact that there were three funding sources: the Ministry of Health, WINZ and private funders. This meant that preparing a statement for a resident required manual reconciliation in Excel. Since our two staff were tied up due to the software inefficiencies, we had to use contract employees to do these reconciliations. Debts were sometimes written off because they were left too long. This customized software had cost us tens of thousands of dollars in contract employee costs and bad debt write offs alone. And that doesn't include the cost of the software in the first place."

Based on the operational difficulty and the need to improve performance and cost effectiveness, ElderCare decided to look for a new software vendor who could bring reliability, speed, the ability to provide statements without manual reconciliations, reasonable cost, good support, the ability to handle the New Zealand regulatory environment, and of course flexibility.

One of the vendors ElderCare approached for an integrated system was GoldCare. Based on GoldCare's reputation plus several design sessions and site visits to some GoldCare clients, ElderCare decided to proceed.

And how are things working with GoldCare? "Running billings decreased from half a day to two seconds!" Somesh said. The process has been significantly streamlined to save time and money. Integration of billings has gone from half a day to 15 minutes. The receipting process has gone from 13 days to five. Billings and receipts now go to separate ledgers, enabling ElderCare's two staff to not only do billings and receipts themselves but the reconciliations as well.

Somesh also reported no system crashes, reduced stress levels all around, and significant savings to the company due to elimination of contract employees, reduction in processing time, and timely monitoring and collection procedures.

The next phase of the project is to roll out the ADT function to the facilities. Because the previous software was slow and prone to crashes, ADT was done at ElderCare's Support Office. That won't be required with GoldCare.

"We really appreciate the demonstrable and visible benefits of GoldCare since we had such a bad experience with our previous software. Because billing is a critical system in our business, we were somewhat nervous about the GoldCare project. However, we decided to take the risk because all evidence pointed to significant improvements in the way we did our billings and maintained our resident database. The project has turned out very well because both Campana and ElderCare cared about its success."