Audits and lender reviews are part of the job in senior living. You’re juggling multiple entities, complex, real-time allocations (labor, intercompany, OpCo/PropCo), portfolio-level reporting for lenders and investors, entity-level reporting for operations, and tight timelines — often. Meanwhile, an auditor emails a PBC list (provided by client) or a lender asks for a reporting package by week’s end. The challenge usually isn’t accuracy. It’s that the story lives across care and operations, billing and collections, time-and-attendance, CRM, and banks, so proving it takes longer than telling it. Being audit-ready at any moment shifts the conversation from hunting for evidence to showing your work. That’s why
What “audit-ready” actually means in senior living
For finance, audit-ready means three things line up at once: timeliness, comparability, and traceability. Timeliness is about getting daily activity from your operating systems into the general ledger while there’s still time to act. Comparability comes from a common structure around community, level of care, and service line, so portfolio views deepen insight and drill-downs answer questions. Traceability is the boring, valuable bit: approvals, attachments, and change logs that explain who did what, when, and under which policy.
There’s one more element unique to this industry: a clean boundary around PHI (protected health information). Clinical details stay in the care/operations system. Finance receives only what it needs to run the business: counts, levels, dates, and dollars. That boundary also lines up with federal guidance for nursing facilities: clear internal controls, exclusions screening, and documentation backed by approvals and audit trails. When these pieces line up, you get the best assisted living software for finance.
What auditors and lenders actually ask for
Audit requests follow a pattern. Cash comes first: current balances, recent activity, and reconciliations with outstanding items listed. Then revenue and AR: charges, adjustments, and receipts tied to the subledger, an aging that matches the GL, and short notes on the largest balances. Next is revenue by community and care line, with intercompany transactions and eliminations that tie cleanly to the consolidation.
Finally, controls: a clear approvals path for journals and payables, a segregation-of-duties view, vendor changes with before-and-after details, and a simple way to show that your integrations ran as expected. If pulling those items feels routine, audit week looks a lot like any other week.
Why this is hard without a finance hub
Most teams are not short on effort. They’re short on a single place where the story comes together. Care platforms such as ALIS can hold census, level-of-care updates, and billable services, yet that information may not map cleanly to the GL dimensions. Billing and collections might close in one system, while AR reporting lives in another. Time-and-attendance often posts late or to inconsistent cost centers. Each community has its own spreadsheet for that one special report. Intercompany and eliminations get treated like projects instead of workflow. None of this is failure; it’s friction. Audits expose the friction because every gap becomes a scavenger hunt.
What changes with cloud accounting as the finance hub
A cloud, multi-entity general ledger sits at the center and treats intercompany, eliminations, and roll-ups as normal work. Around it, the systems that run the day post to finance on a predictable rhythm. Care and operations contribute census, level-of-care, and services mapped to your dimensions. Billing passes charges, adjustments, and receipts with payer context. Time-and-attendance brings in actual hours by department or cost center. CRM adds near-term move-ins and move-outs. Bank connections keep the cash picture current by mid-morning.
Executive views open at the portfolio level and drill into communities without exporting anything. Approvals and an audit trail travel with each transaction. PHI stays in the clinical system by design. The same mechanics that sharpen weekly reviews also make audits calmer — exactly what you expect from the best assisted living software approach to finance.
Proof beats promises
Review week goes faster when the evidence is easy to access. It helps when you can open an approvals matrix for a community, click into a journal’s history with its attachment and timestamp, show a vendor change with its before-and-after bank detail, and point to a simple status readout for recent posts from your supporting, integrated applications. Intercompany detail by entity pair — with the elimination logic that matches your policy — closes the loop. At that point, you’re not building a narrative, you’re showing a record that provides strategic insight and confidence in your performance.
Multi-entity and M&A realities
Senior living portfolios evolve. New communities join, structures change, and lenders raise the bar on consistency. A finance hub pays off when a new entity adopts the standard chart and dimensions on day one, the first consolidated view arrives inside the first month, and the covenant package is an output rather than a side project. That readiness matters whether you’re acquiring or being evaluated; it signals a steady operation and saves time on both sides of the table.
Where Sage Intacct and BT Partners fit
Tools matter, and how they’re put to work matters just as much. Sage Intacct aligns with how senior living operates. Multi-entity capabilities are built in, dimensional reporting reflects communities and care lines, and integrations with platforms such as ALIS, billing, time and attendance, marketing/leasing, and banks are reliable.
BT Partners provides practical solutions and advice that support daily operations. We help design a dimensional chart tailored to your business, map your existing data into that structure, shape approvals and audit trails to align with your policies, and develop the recurring lender and audit views you’ll reuse. Our goal is to help our senior living industry clients answer ongoing questions that keep the system running smoothly, because being audit-ready is easier to maintain than to create last minute.
Closing thought
Being audit-ready is what happens when finance runs smoothly the other eleven months. A cloud accounting hub connected to your best assisted living software provides one place to view your business, a structure that keeps roll-ups clear, and evidence you can produce without slowing down. Reach out to our team to learn more about how we can help.
