CASE STUDY

Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center Unifies Finance on One Platform with NetSuite 

July 29, 2026

Industries: Healthcare

Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center is a federally qualified health center based in Hillsboro, Oregon, with roughly 22 sites spanning primary care, obstetrics, dental, behavioral health, and outreach services, plus an administrative site. Its footprint includes primary care clinics, three mobile clinics, and five school-based clinics, supported by around 850 employees.  

As a mission-driven nonprofit with strict government reporting requirements, Virginia Garcia needed financial systems that could match the complexity of its operations. The finance team partnered with Caravel to consolidate onto NetSuite, taking a deliberate, phased approach led largely by internal staff.  

Challenge 

Before NetSuite, Virginia Garcia ran its finance function across three disconnected platforms, which created manual work and blind spots across the organization. 

  • Three separate systems handled the core work: Abila MIP for accounting and financial reporting, Workday Adaptive for budgeting, and a separate purchasing system, none of which talked to each other. 
  • Manual data transfers meant budgets built in one system had to be exported and uploaded into the accounting system through CSV files just to reconcile. 
  • Purchasing lived outside accounting, so purchase orders and supporting documentation were not available within the financial system of record. 
  • Reporting couldn’t reflect the mission, with no straightforward way to track results down to the individual grant level, a critical need for a federally qualified health center. 

Solution 

Virginia Garcia selected NetSuite and Caravel after evaluating several leading platforms, prioritizing a single system that could combine accounting, budgeting, and purchasing while remaining user-friendly for both finance staff and end users. A deciding factor was NetSuite’s ability to hold statistical accounts alongside financial data, letting the team upload measures like employee FTE and program encounters to drive richer dashboards and reporting. Caravel guided a phased rollout with a detailed, task-based project plan. 

  • Phase one built the foundation, standardizing naming conventions and expanding the general ledger string to track individual grants rather than only funders, while moving accounts payable and receivable toward a paperless model with documentation attached directly to transactions. 
  • Five years of financial history were migrated into NetSuite, spanning pre-pandemic and pandemic periods, giving the team comparative data and dashboard trends from day one. The team handled much of the CSV upload work itself, which built deep familiarity with the system before go-live. 
  • Phase two, about six months later, added purchasing, employee expense reports, and purchasing cards, giving accounting time to get comfortable and build an internal training program of videos and Teams sessions before end users came onboard. 
  • Phase three introduced NetSuite Planning and Budgeting, which the team began only after the first two phases were complete and has now run for a full budget cycle. 
  • A customized design was built to satisfy FQHC government reporting, tracking by program, department, and position code, along with two years of statistical account data to support trend analysis. 

“Moving toward a paperless system has been one of the biggest impacts. Employee expense reports and all the backup documentation live right there with the transaction, so approvals are faster and there is no hunting through network files when you need to research something later,” said Deanna Vawser, Budget Controller at Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center. 

Outcome 

With finance unified on NetSuite, Virginia Garcia replaced manual handoffs with connected workflows and gained the reporting depth its mission demands. 

  • Time returned to the team as paperless expense reports, payables, and receivables eliminated the search for backup documentation and sped up approvals. 
  • Grant-level tracking now supports the reporting and accountability required of a federally qualified health center. 
  • Statistical accounts drive faster analysis, with monthly data uploads powering standard reports that explain variances in financial dashboards and sharpen budgets and projections. 
  • A single source of truth replaced three disconnected systems, with historical and statistical data in one place for trending across offices, programs, and time. 

Looking ahead, Virginia Garcia is refining its budgeting model in NetSuite Planning and Budgeting to rely on more calculations and fewer manual inputs, and is extending its fixed asset tracking to include non-capitalized equipment so it can build both operational and capital budgets around equipment replacement cycles. 

Ready to Bring Your Finance Systems Together? 

If your organization is stitching together separate systems for accounting, budgeting, and purchasing, Caravel can help you consolidate onto NetSuite with a phased plan built around your team’s capacity and your reporting requirements. Reach out to start the conversation.

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