How Sprenger Healthcare cut its chart of accounts by up to 75% with Business Central

Meet Brandon, the CFO who grew with the company

Before Brandon Malanowski became Chief Financial Officer of Sprenger Healthcare, he worked on the lawn crew for a summer job in high school. He came back full time after college as a staff accountant, learned Dynamics Great Plains (GP) from the ground up, and worked his way up to CFO.

When Sprenger needed to move to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Brandon knew the business, the accounting processes, and the operational complexity that came with both.

Caring for residents, accounting for 80 entities

What began as a family-owned nursing facility has grown into 12 nursing facilities across Ohio and South Carolina, two drug rehab locations, plus home health, hospice, and a staffing agency. Guided by third-generation leadership with experience outside the family business, Sprenger continues to expand services around the needs of its residents.

Making GP work for roughly 80 legal entities was cumbersome and error-prone. For instance, the account for nursing supplies had to be created 80 times in GP, one per entity. Each one relied on someone naming and setting it up the same way.

Business Central is the logical progression

Sprenger's aging servers needed replacing, and Microsoft had begun sunsetting GP with incentives to move. The timing to get off an on-premises system lined up perfectly.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC) was the natural next step: familiar enough to make the transition from GP easier, and able to bring Sprenger's historical data along.

"There's a lot more thought that went into the accounting makeup of BC. Where GP took a lot of manual upkeep to do what we needed, BC just works that way out of the box," Brandon says.

The benefits are immediate:

• Multi-entity dimensions. Dimensions replaced rigid account segments.
• Bank reconciliation. Matching lines in Excel was replaced with reviewing only the mismatches.
• Fixed asset management. More flexibility to track medical equipment, facilities, and building related assets.

Consolidated chart of accounts and connected accounts payable

Brandon also emphasizes that moving from GP to Business Central is not a lift-and-shift project. The value comes from rethinking the chart of accounts and automating manual tasks as much as possible.

When Sprenger and Alta Vista Technology started working together, we reduced the chart of accounts by up to 75%. With the right foundation in place, financial statement design became intuitive.

For Brandon, an implementation partner’s role is to listen first, challenge the status quo, and recommend the right path using Business Central to its full capacity.

Sprenger added Binary Stream to automate intercompany entries across the 80-entity structure, turning hours of monthly reconciliation into zero. SmartConnect followed, linking Corecentric AP with Business Central to cut repetitive manual work.

Success starts with cash, and ends with the team

When Brandon defines success, he starts with cash management. In healthcare, revenue only matters if the organization collects it. He watches expenses, cash flow, AR, budgets, and collections across Medicare, Medicaid, private pay, and managed care.

Business Central gives him confidence in the numbers, and he trusts his team. That frees him for the work that matters most: staffing, and the reporting that keeps each building accountable.

Staffing is one of the biggest challenges in healthcare. Brandon can pull the cost of agency staffing straight from the system and weigh it against investing in his own workforce, asking whether a higher wage base or stronger benefits would reduce agency reliance and improve cash flow.

Reporting carries the same weight at the building level. With Business Central, Brandon can give each administrator the detail on where to cut 5%.

"If the buildings are beating their budgets and hitting their net income marks, then I know I'm doing the right thing on my end. A lot more of my success is theirs." Brandon Malanowski, CFO of Sprenger Healthcare

Where AI comes in

Brandon sees a lot of opportunity in AI to speed up routine work, such as flagging a vendor bill that lands two weeks late instead of catching it on reporting day. Bank reconciliation and fixed-asset depreciation are the areas where he'd like to see AI go next.

The goal behind all of it: compress the close and reporting so the monthly board meeting can move earlier in the month.

A partner who keeps Sprenger ahead

Alta Vista Technology’s customer success manager, Jermain McCoy, keeps Sprenger’s team current on the Business Central capabilities that matter to daily operations. Brandon would reach out to Chris DeLorean, their Dynamics 365 consultant, when they needed more support.

That ongoing relationship is how Sprenger became beta testers when SmartConnect began working on a platform upgrade.

"It's nice to have those opportunities to be involved," Brandon says.