Domus Valuas operates small-scale private residential care homes across the Netherlands: 35 locations, almost 1,500 employees, and just over 800 residents. The company is the product of a 2022 merger between Valuas Zorggroep, founded by Erik van der Boom in 2011, and its main peer in the market, Domus Magnus.
The challenge
A merger of two similar companies is still a merger of two different finance cultures. The locations kept running, but the head office in Hilversum inherited two sets of systems, two ways of reporting, and three and a half years of work knitting them into one.
The monthly report that came out of that was extensive, and it was made by hand. Controllers exported large datasets to Excel, the compute alone took time, and everything landed in the first days of the month.
We have an extensive monthly report, and a lot of time and energy goes into it. We manage it every month, but it is always a race against the clock.
Sander Ooievaar, Manager Finance & Control, Domus Valuas
The weekly occupancy figures, the revenue side of a care business, had their own hand-built Excel sheet: complicated, fragile, and dependent on calling location managers to check whether the numbers were still true.
The solution
The contact came through the network. Erik van der Boom heard the story behind Nance, called Sander the same evening, and within a week there was a pitch and a pilot running. The green light took four to five weeks in total, fast for the care sector, and deliberate: the criteria were accuracy of the figures, the quality of what Nance produced, and cost.
What made the difference, in a market shouting about AI from every channel, was that Nance is a finance tool rather than a general one. The team had tried AI tools before. They always disappointed.
The moment of recognition came in the kickoff meeting, when the room asked Nance for an analysis of three years of energy costs across all 35 locations.
Half a day of work for one person, normally.
Three minutes.
That is when I thought: this is really going to mean something.
Erik van der Boom, director, Domus Valuas
How Domus Valuas runs finance with Nance
1. Reporting on schedule
The monthly report now takes less than a day instead of three, and the quality moved the other way: better layout, more content, and KPIs translated so an operational reader understands them without a finance background. The board gets an occupancy link from Nance automatically on Monday morning. The weekly investments update for the investment committee is fully automated, and kept arriving while the colleague who built it was on holiday.
2. Occupancy in ten minutes
The occupancy analysis, in- and outflow of residents across 35 locations, is now one export into Nance. One minute of importing, nine minutes of reading and understanding what is there.
3. Back office work
With cost centres per location, one small correction used to mean making the same booking over and over so that every location report presented it correctly. Now the team hands Nance a template and the instruction once, and the correction lands the same way in all 35 reports. Staffing-agency invoices are read out line by line, people, hours, rates and overtime, and matched against agreed rates and registered hours. Dashboards from external maintenance parties are checked against the company's own administration instead of being taken on faith.
4. Making the whole team fluent
Sander introduced a weekly Nance hour: everyone on the 17-person team shows something they built or gets inspired by what a colleague built, from debtor administration to business control. The whole team of seventeen is now active, and the habit is shifting: questions that used to go to Sander go to Nance first.
They are starting to see Nance as their colleague. Ask your colleague first, and she gets back to you. That took getting used to, and now it is landing. Roughly half of everyone's time used to go to recurring chores; that is heading toward a tenth, and the time that frees up goes into new things and better quality.
Sander Ooievaar, Manager Finance & Control, Domus Valuas
Trust and compliance in a care organisation
Domus Valuas works with resident data in a sector where privacy and security legislation set a high bar. Before go-live, an external privacy officer screened Nance during procurement, and the compliance officer reviewed the agreement and the data storage. In daily use, published dashboards sit behind Microsoft sign-in, with an optional password on top, and new work is tried in a sandbox before anything is shared.
The figures are trusted because they are checked. The team still runs its own monthly report in parallel for now, knows what should come out of each dashboard, and traces the output back to the data that went in.
The outcome
Two months in, finance is the department the rest of the organisation looks at when it wants to know what AI is for. Other departments see what the finance team ships and want in: a flywheel, started by the team that used to be the bottleneck of the month.
A very fine, hardworking colleague. The reports and dashboards that come my way are good, accurate and fast, and that gives me much more oversight and control in my role.
Erik van der Boom, director, Domus Valuas
What's next
The team is working on the hour-accounting match for external contractors, connecting registered hours, agreed rates and invoices into one view of how effectively staff is deployed. Erik's ambition is adoption: making the group of intensive users bigger, so Nance learns the organisation faster. Asked whether he would recommend Nance to other care organisations, he first said no. He wanted to keep the head start to himself.
