PA Connecting Communities
Our organization, PA Connecting Communities (PACC) is a 501(c)3 non-profit servicing the physically and intellectually disabled community in the tri-county region since 2004. Due to expansion, it became quite clear that PA Connecting Communities’ business model required change from a “paper” organization to a “paperless” organization.
As a result, we became familiar with Sierra w/o Wires in January of 2012 for the express purpose of reviewing and possibly entering into an agreement to utilize their Sierra Billing Manager Application. The initial purpose was to reduce or eliminate the large amount of paperwork our employees were required to complete, and Account Managers were required to process. We also liked the added benefit of affording our employees the convenience of inputting their information electronically instead of writing it out by hand.
Sierra was kind enough to setup a staging environment for our organization to “test” the application in order to ensure that this was the right decision. Once tested, PACC executives found the application had the potential to meet PACC’s needs exactly.
It was at this point that PACC began to appreciate the outstanding service and response time Sierra provided, and continues to provide, when issues arise or enhancements are needed for the application. It’s not often that a service provider will respond to an email in the middle of the night, and although we don’t expect it, Sierra is a company that does so. As a matter of fact, we not only receive responses from their Support, but also their CEO. That’s true customer service! Sierra consistently exceeds our expectations from a service perspective with respect to their application.
Regarding the application, we have been able to cut down our Managers’ time to review and approve documentation from our employees from 3-4 days working long hours at the end of the month (the paper way) to an hour or two on a weekly basis using the application. In addition, prior to using this application, our Financial Manager would have to manually input a single bill into Pennsylvania’s system for reimbursement for services rendered. This was quite time consuming (many hours) as the inputs could amount to thousands of bills each month, whereas with the application, the billings can be uploaded as part of a batch process reducing the time to minutes. Additionally, when the billings are processed, they can be rapidly downloaded to the application and a Revenue report generated to determine what has been paid, not paid, and the variance. Another very important feature that this system has provided is the ability to verify the information that has been input more accurately. There are very few errors, and the errors are able to be fixed more readily, than with the paper system.
Our employees adapted rather easily to this application as it is extremely easy to use with little to no technological abilities. Probably one of the greatest complements we received was from a new employee we recently trained on the application, and then remarked that when using a similar system for another organization it took him 15 steps (and even more clicks) to enter one section of documentation for one client and the process must be repeated for additional clients, whereas in Sierra Billing Manager it took only one step to enter similar documentation, and progressing to the next client was seamless.
In conclusion, we would most certainly recommend this application to any organization that has needs similar to ours.
Arlene B., Executive Director
Peggy M., Executive Director
Anthony M., Jr, Sr. Business/IT Analyst
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