As I’ve come to various Therap Conferences, have met my fellow trainers and spoken to various agencies I’ve discovered that everyone uses the Therap Financial Module differently. Some use it to track individual petty cash, to house petty cash to just tracking house expenses. This got me to thinking.. I want to hear everyone else’s ideas and how they use it. Below, i’ll detail out how we use Therap Financial in my houses, and how well it works.
First, We use our Therap Financials to track everything that the individual may have for financial tracking. We have quite a few individuals with our CEO as the Rep Payee. So we track all of their data in therap. From all deposits: wages, SSB, SSI, random funds, to all their expenses: Room and Board, debts, groceries, clothing purchases, etc.
We also use it to track Gift cards! For an individual who has a gift card, we can track purchases and accurately account for all the funds. We just set it up as a new checking accounts and label It with such as “walmart gift card5867” with the last 4 digits of the card number. This helps us keep track in the event that an individual may receive multiple gift cards for the same place and we can always know what was purchased.
I LOVE that we do this. I can easily see and track all expenses, the rep payee can pull reports and know that day their accounts balance without having to go into online banking. Also, I can go in and search for all items over 50.00 and be able to add them to the Personal Property list if needed as a double QA check.
For us, only DSP2’s and above have access to the financial module, as not everyone needs to be privy to the individuals personal information. It’s also great since if an individual wants to know, we can pull it up and show them. by scanning in and attaching receipts and bank statements as well, it just makes life a little easier.
We use it very similarly at our agency; we track all cash on hand as well as checking. We also make a monthly report using the excel option and then a macro (pivot tables, formatting, etc) to show all income/expenses by category; this report we share with the case managers, guardians, and/or family members, and also for audits. We also pull a similar yearly report for Representative Payee Reports to Social Security. Program Managers/Assistants, Representative Payee, and their supervisors have access to the financial module.
Before using Therap to track finances, we had to transfer data using a flash drive between the residential sites (cash on hand) and the office (checking); we had to copy and paste to a common ledger. Everything was delayed by a minimum of a week because the program managers only updated finances at the office weekly. Sometimes, information was lost and had to be recreated. Now everything is in real time and everyone has access to the same ledger. The Personal Finance Module is a great time saver and the quality of record keeping has improved tremendously.
Features I wish we had in the Personal Finance Module:
1. ability to do a check reconciliation
2. ability to make a report by category – right now I am doing this using Excel
3. a place to store a report (similar to the way we can save an ISP data report)
4. a place to store attachements (other than receipts) in the personal finance module
I definitely agree with the Wish We hads. Would make things a bit easier. we use our reports for reconciliation as well and I love it. Do you allow just managers/supervisors access? or do all staff have access to be able to track?