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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Partnering locally, scaling financial insight: Finance modernization in senior living
00:11:24
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- [00:00]
A
Hi everyone. This is Lucas Voss with Becker's Healthcare. Thanks so much for tuning into the Becker's Healthcare podcast series. It's great to have you. Today we're talking about partnering locally, scaling financial insight, finance modernization in senior living. And I'm so excited to be joined for today's discussion by Natalie Ostas, Associate Vice president of finance and controller at Covenant Living Communities and Services. Natalie, thanks so much for being here today. It's great to have you.
- [00:28]
B
Hi, Lucas. Thank you. It's great to be here.
- [00:30]
A
Absolutely. For our audience, I want to start off with introductions. Could you share a little bit about yourself and your work in healthcare?
- [00:37]
B
Yes. So, like Lucas said, my name is Natalie, hostess. I'm the associate Vice president of finance at Covenant Living Communities and Services. I have been with Covenant Living for seven years now in a few different roles on our finance team and in this role in particular for four and a half years. So Covenant Living Communities is the seventh largest not for profit senior living provider that was identified by the 2025 Leading Age Zigler 200 survey. Covenant Living has 20 communities in 11 states. We kind of like to say with, with a laugh that we're located in the four corners of the country and many states in between. Our headquarters are in just north of Chicago and that's where our finance team sits with me. I oversee accounting, financial reporting, financial compliance, treasury management, our accounts payable function and our workday financial system administration. So my team sits here with a very centralized model out of our corporate office in Illinois.
- [01:48]
A
So great to have you, Natalie. I'm sure we'll touch a lot on those different aspects that you've mentioned there. Senior housing demand continues to climb with some metros now above 90% occupancy. Pretty staggering number. How is Covenant Living planning as expectations for care grow? And how have these trends most influenced your capital planning and or workforce strategy?
- [02:16]
B
Yeah, so, you know, I don't think it'll come as a surprise to hear that our industry needs more units to accommodate the aging boomer population. As that boomer group gets to be the age group where they're moving into our communities, there is great need for additional units. So Covenant Living is managing growth through affiliations and acquisitions, but also through our existing communities, building new units at those communities. So we've built new units within the last, you know, five, six years. Also have had a good handful of affiliations and acquisitions. So kind of managing that growth through both avenues. We're always closely monitoring the housing market as the housing market affects residents selling their homes. And then moving into our communities and then specifically on our finance team, we're monitoring things like our debt capacity, you know, evaluating the ability to take on new debt to support growth, new debt, to maybe build new communities. Where do we want to build communities? Where is the greatest need in the market? You know, being located across the United States. That's something that is always being evaluated. Most recently we had a large financing in April 2025 which will be used for new construction projects at a good handful of our communities, bringing some additional new units into our system.
- [03:45]
A
And you've mentioned sort of your centralized team in Chicago, in north of Chicago, and you recently brought finance onto the workday platform, more centralization, building on your existing foundation that you had rather than features. What are some of the outcomes that have been most impactful for you and what advice would you offer peers evaluating a similar move?
- [04:10]
B
Yeah, so Covenant Living was live with Workday HCM module payroll and expenses since 2017 and going live with workday financials and you know, everything that came under the workday financials module, really it was a win for our end users, our team members at the communities. Things as simple as approving an invoice can be done from a phone now versus needing to be in our VPN network. It directly impacted my team, you know, 100% of what we were doing or how we were doing, what we were doing changed. And so that, that was significant. But the biggest positive is probably that increased end user satisfaction across the communities. With the move into workday financials, we're able to get more real time information. It's far more simple for us to get information with all the drilling capabilities and have that at our fingertips versus you know, running reports, manipulating reports, that kind of thing. I think the other big notable win is that the accounting team doesn't hold all of the information like we used to. Our users have been in the system, in the workday system for a long time. People are used to being in workday as they had to for payroll in all HR functions since 2017 for us. And so those with the security access have real time access versus needing to come to the accounting team as like the holder of all this, the financial information.
- [05:47]
A
And you've mentioned the impact on the organization as a whole too, in terms of easier access for locations outside of that finance team. How has that implementation evolved, how you partner with the rest of the organization itself?
- [06:05]
B
Yeah, so some of this we're still working through. We've been live for a year now. And the whole intention with the workday financials implementation was to transform our business. And so things like developing a dashboard for the executive directors at our community where they can run their own operating statement or click on a tab and view their, their operating statement, they can view real time results and eliminate that need for the finance team to, you know, be the middleman between the executive directors and their financial results. So there's a lot of efficiencies there and increased satisfaction in the partnership between finance and the communities. You know, it was important for us to keep some of the allocations and how we record and produce financials. As an industry, we have to produce financials at the residential level of living, assisted living, skilled nursing, for compliance purposes and understanding our business. And so we've been able to do that with workday financials. And it's pretty simple to get to those different results just with a click of the button in the system, which is a big win across all teams.
- [07:24]
A
You've mentioned dashboards, data and of course, efficiency. And I think we'd be amiss if we wouldn't talk about AI in this context. Many providers are formalizing those AI strategies and finance leaders like yourself, I'm assuming, are being asked to enable better decisions closer to the point of care through all of these tools. How are you equipping your teams with those better insights you've mentioned to the dashboards? And what does your strategy around AI and automation look like?
- [07:56]
B
Yeah, so our finance team, and really not outside of finance, our executive leadership team has been talking about AI, bringing it to all of our various functional departments and groups. I had the opportunity to go to Workday Rising about a month ago now and came home really excited about the opportunities that we have. You know, I think Covenant Living has a unique opportunity to use AI and implement it, especially in our finance team. Being that we're in the workday ecosystem, I don't know of many providers in the system yet, hoping we can get some friends there, but I'm confident that AI is going to ease my team's workload and allow us to work smarter, not harder. Workday is releasing things like the financial close agent. I know that's, I think, the one that's at the top of my list. My team spends a lot of time before we even click close on a monthly basis, spends a lot of time reviewing things like budget to actual variance and then spending a lot of time digging into those variances. What's causing those variances? Is it a legitimate reason? Is it something that needs to be addressed before we close? And there's agents at our fingertips now haven't implemented them yet, but there's going to be agents at our fingertips to help do that analysis for us and allow the team to again work smarter, taking just some of that drilling in and digging in out of the hands of our team members. Another one we're excited about is financial audit agent. We have not only our financial statement audit, but we being in the senior living industry, we get, you know, cost report audits, things like that. We are feels like we are getting audit requests on a weekly basis and having an agent to help pull that support would really transform our business. It would transform relationships with our communities as we're as my team would be able to provide support some of that on a quicker basis than we are. And then I think another opportunity that, you know, we have is just being in that workday community. I didn't see many senior living providers in the Healthcare Breakout Summit at Rising. And so for us, getting insight from other healthcare providers outside of senior living, what are they doing? Getting ideas that we could bring back to our teams is a great opportunity for us.
- [10:23]
A
Yeah, Natalie, smarter versus harder, right? Like you've mentioned is the key here, which is, which is so important. And again, thank you so much for being here and sharing all these insights. What a fantastic conversation. I'd love to open the floor to you, Natalie. Is there anything else that you'd like to share that we haven't touched on that might be important to know for our audience?
- [10:42]
B
No, I think that's about it. We've done a lot of discussing, you know, as, as it relates to the AI and living in the workday system. Now a lot of discussing about effort versus impact and start, stop, continue. And we're nowhere near done with these conversations, but are excited to be able to have the conversations and work with Workday as we go through this transformation.
- [11:07]
A
Natalie, so great to have you. Thanks for being here.
- [11:10]
B
Thank you.
- [11:11]
A
And we also want to thank our podcast sponsor, Workday. You can tune into more podcasts from Becker's Healthcare by visiting our podcast page@beckershospitalreview.com.