Outsourcing your finance function: Key benefits for PCNs

A typical finance function will have teams of people that a) have a forward-looking strategic remit, b) ensure the financial data is accurate, and c) ensure that financial controls are robust and adhered to, ensuring that no data is lost, misrepresented, or misappropriated.

Smaller organisations, such as GP Practices or Primary Care Networks (PCNs), often rely on historical financial information, such as year-end accounts, but seek a more robust system for financial reporting and control but encounter challenges due to a lack of resources, skills, or both.

Over the past few years, changes to funding in primary care have emphasised the need for GP Practices and PCNs to move on from the historic ‘reactive’ mindset and towards a proactive, strategic one. Placing greater emphasis on the accuracy of the day-to-day transactional processing is imperative, capturing accurate data providing the foundation for monthly reporting.

PCNs are financially un-typical in that they are large organisations, both in terms of funding and stakeholders (or, interested parties), including member practices, and the population that those member practices serve. However, they commonly lack the resources and skills required to support their scale.

PCNs draw on the resources of their member practices, and providing transparency over funding flows in financial systems can be a challenge, requiring good governance, robust systems, and controls (and adherence to them) and clear reporting.

There are increasingly more reports of disputes within PCNs based on a lack of trust in the financial data.

Benefits of outsourcing the PCN finances

There are advantages to outsourcing, key benefits include:

1. Access to expertise

Outsourcing provides depth of specialist knowledge, resources, and scale. This provides the PCN with accurate, financial information to support decision making and allocation of resources on a timely, continuous basis.

2. Focus on Core Activities

Outsourcing creates time and resources for the PCN Manager and support team to focus on making timely strategic decisions on utilising funding appropriately, supporting the strategic aims of the organisation.

3. Scalability

As primary care evolves quickly against the backdrop of a challenging political, social, and economic environment, networks will grow and combine across neighbourhoods. Funding may increase but spread over a wider geographical area using more resource from primary and social care. As organisations grow and become more complex, so will the requirement to have appropriate finance functions to support that scale of operation.

4. Cost savings

Outsourcing eliminates the need to have in-house teams and the associated overheads of providing benefits, training, and human resources.

5. Reduction in Risk

Regulated professional service firms keep up to date with changes in laws and regulations. They have access to associated legal, human resource and wider consulting services that assist with organisations as they grow and become more complex.

All solutions benefit from the use of cloud accounting software, which allows seamless communication and real-time access to data remotely. Data processing has an audit trail, and system access controls restrict access to appropriate defined individuals.

Using various plug-ins to a core system creates advanced functionality, including forecasting, management reporting, payroll integration, purchase-to-pay and more.

Get in touch with our healthcare specialists

If you are considering outsourcing your finance function, please do get in touch with a member of our Healthcare team.

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