Metrics that Matter #8: Resident Days
Welcome to a new edition of Metrics that Matter! Today we’re going to explore a popular data topic: how to compare performance across communities using the KPI “Resident Days”.
Read on to learn more!
KPI: Resident Days
What are “Resident Days”
Resident Days are the sum of residents living in a community per day for a given time period. For example, if you had 10 residents on day 1, and 15 residents on day 2, the “Resident Days” for the time period (Day 1 + Day 2) is 25.
At Clarent, we count second residents as part of Resident Days (and we recommend that everyone does this), however we can also remove second residents from the calculation if customers request.
Why is it important to measure Resident Days?
Resident Days provides an easy way to normalize expenses (especially variable expenses like labor hours and controllable operating expenses) across communities that may have different census. These normalized expenses are often called “PRDs” - expenses per resident day.
For example, if you have two communities and one spends $20K on food per month and the other spends $10K on food per month, it may look like one community is spending far more.
However, if you take the Resident Days into account and divide food cost by resident days the two communities may actually be spending the same amount on a per resident day basis. This allows you to compare communities “apples to apples”.
Why is it hard to calculate Resident Days?
Calculating Resident Days requires understanding census (including second residents) for each community on every day of the time period. This is a lot of manual work if you’re pulling it by hand from your rent roll system. It gets even harder if you want to calculate PRDs or if you want to look at labor hours by resident day - that’s pulling data from payroll AND rent roll.
How do we do it at Clarent?
We automatically integrate rent roll and expense data and calculate both Resident Days and expenses (e.g. food, labor hours, etc) as PRDs. These types of KPIs are all available within the Clarent KPI Library. We also offer the ability to stack rank communities by PRDs to measure performance.
Resident Days provides an easy way to normalize expenses across communities that may have different census.