Nextech provides electronic health record (EHR) and practice management software for specialty healthcare practices, including ophthalmology, dermatology, orthopedics, plastic surgery, and med spas. As Nextech's FP&A team managed workforce planning and complex revenue models across SaaS and financial services, its existing EPM system was falling short. The team needed a more flexible platform that could support detailed financial planning while making information easier to access across the business.
Inheriting a System That Set the Limits
When Kelly Bartlett joined Nextech as SVP of FP&A, the planning system she inherited was not meeting the needs of the finance department or the company more broadly. Some of that came from the system's own limitations. Some came from implementation choices made by her predecessor.
The constraints showed up in the two areas that mattered most: workforce planning, and revenue modeling across both the SaaS and financial services revenue streams.
The interface made everything slower. It felt pieced together over years and reskinned after an acquisition, without much substance underneath, and finding anything meant hunting through screens where nothing was stored intuitively.
Speed matters when you are answering questions for stakeholders, when you are turning around new forecasts and scenarios and reporting. User interface and usability is not superficial. Kelly Bartlett, SVP of FP&A, Nextech
Why a New Generation Beat a Re-Implementation
The choice was not obvious. Re-implementing the existing system would have kept the team on familiar ground, since everyone already knew the tool. Moving to a new platform meant putting the whole team on a learning curve at once.
Kelly weighed the workload against the future benefit and concluded that the gains from a new generation system would far outweigh the cost of everyone upskilling. The benefits arrived almost immediately, first in workforce planning and more recently in revenue modeling.
As she puts it, she has never looked back since making the switch.
Workforce Planning Built Around Nextech's Data
The first area to pay off was workforce planning. Fintastic let the team customize the model to the data actually available at Nextech, view the workforce across multiple dimensions, plan at granular levels, and change future dimensionality as the business changed. Accuracy in the workforce forecast improved right away.
Business partners in people and culture, along with departmental owners, gained a level of visibility and control they had not had before.
Much of that flexibility comes from Fintastic's low-code environment. The syntax is close to what finance professionals already use in Excel and Power Query, so the FP&A team builds and owns complex models without handing them to engineering.
You can get engineering level complexity models through your finance professionals with minimal upskilling. Kelly Bartlett, SVP of FP&A, Nextech
Opening the System to the Whole Business
Security and permissioning turned out to be the unlock. Because Fintastic supports permissions down to individual cells within tables, Nextech can open the system to far more people across the business than was realistic with older systems. Pair that with a customizable, modern interface and adoption follows.
Department leaders now ask to get in, from VP level down to directors and managers. Before Fintastic, those leaders saw their financials as a static Excel dump of the P&L once a month or once a quarter. The appetite to dig into numbers they are accountable for turned out to be significant.
Nextech also built detailed vendor-level planning into its models. Cost center owners can drill from a plan line through to the general ledger and hyperlink out to the underlying invoices, which gives them visibility, control, and transparency into the costs they are held accountable for.
An AI Agent the CFO Uses Himself
Nextech has already put Fintastic's AI agent to work. The team used it to rebuild a series of risk and opportunity scenarios, giving it instructions to toggle specific drivers and return the output. It was fast, and when the team checked the work, the agent had built the scenarios accurately and the same way they would have done manually.
They have also used it to run variance analysis and draft commentary for board and management reporting.
Adoption is reaching the executive level too. While Nextech was preparing for this interview, the CFO queried the system himself about historical trends and came away impressed enough to see it as a way to answer his own questions and take load off the FP&A team.
