Eight people, fifteen hours apiece, every month. At a large Texas health system, producing a recurring report consumed 120 staff-hours. Regional finance teams used different data sources and different metrics. Leaders could debate the figures before they ever reached the decisions. The reporting process had become a small industry of its own.
Then the organization standardized its key performance indicators, aligned its dashboards and introduced self-service analysis through StrataJazz. According to Strata’s customer account, the monthly preparation shrank to one person working for thirty minutes. The reported annual labor savings were $300,000. The more interesting result was the removal of a recurring argument: whose numbers should everyone use?
- The job: connect financial plans with what actually happens.
- The buyers: hospitals, universities, banks and credit unions.
- The lesson: agree on definitions before adding more dashboards.
The business of a shared answer
Strata Decision Technology occupies an unglamorous but consequential corner of enterprise software. Its cloud platforms, StrataJazz and Axiom, help organizations budget, forecast, calculate costs and understand performance. More than 2,300 organizations use its solutions, the company says. The work happens behind services people care deeply about: a hospital bed, a university course, a community bank branch.
A hospital’s charge for a procedure does not answer what delivering that care costs. Finance needs to bring together spending, staffing, patient activity and reimbursement. Strata’s cost accounting and decision-support tools help examine those relationships. Its capital-planning software supports another difficult conversation: which investments deserve a slice of a limited budget?
That puts Strata in enterprise performance management, the market for helping institutions plan and evaluate their finances. Oracle Cloud EPM and Workday Adaptive Planning address broader planning needs; Harris Affinity appears in healthcare cost-accounting comparisons. Strata’s distinguishing proposition is industry detail, with financial tools built around the vocabulary and workflows of its chosen sectors.
A forecast with too many moving parts
At Scripps Health, a board member asked a wonderfully inconvenient question: “Why aren’t we using a rolling forecast?” Annual assumptions were being overtaken by changing reimbursement and payer mix. A seven-month budgeting exercise was struggling to keep up with the business it described.
The answer involved Axiom, but also subtraction. One business unit initially had 125 forecast groups. Maintaining them became unmanageable. The team reduced the count to 45. Scripps eventually reported a four-week quarterly forecast cycle, supported by an internal super-user team that helped colleagues learn the process.
A model needs enough detail to guide a decision - and few enough moving parts that people will keep it current.
THE PRACTICAL LESSON
That is the detail another finance team can copy. Choose a useful forecasting level. Name the people who own it. Train local experts. A beautifully detailed model that nobody can update gives management an elaborate picture of yesterday.
Follow the patient, then the money
Yale New Haven Health offers a different example. Its older mainframe cost-accounting system had become cumbersome as the organization grew. Processing took too long; reporting was difficult to extend to more users. The replacement needed to connect clinical quality with the economics of care.
With StrataJazz, Yale brought cost and clinical information together and embedded cost data in Epic order sets. Physicians and decision-support nurses also spent three months reviewing adverse outcomes to establish quality variation indicators. The software sat inside a larger program of clinical judgment and redesign.
The published account describes $12.4 million in cumulative savings over five years in sickle-cell care. Those were results of the health system’s work, supported by data. Buying a cost-accounting application does not reproduce a clinical program. The useful question is which care decisions become possible once the information is accessible.
A wider business, with a familiar problem
Catherine and Don Kleinmuntz founded Strata in 1996. Their backgrounds help explain its interest in decisions: Don’s career combined academic research with practical analytics, and he later served as president of INFORMS. The company’s early proposition linked sophisticated financial analysis with coordination among people who needed to use it.
Roper acquired Strata in 2015. In 2023, Roper bought Syntellis for $1.381 billion, adjusted for cash acquired and certain liabilities assumed, and integrated it into Strata. The transaction brought Axiom into the business. Strata is a subsidiary of publicly traded Roper; the acquisition figure is neither Strata’s valuation nor money it raised.
Axiom gives universities tools to model tuition, fees and financial aid alongside wider plans. For financial institutions, it supports planning, profitability analysis and reporting, including a reporting platform powered by Microsoft Power BI. In July 2026, Strata acquired c. myers, adding strategic advisory and asset-liability management expertise for banks and credit unions.
The commercial model combines enterprise SaaS and data with services such as implementation, training and advisory work. Buying begins with a sales conversation and a demonstration. For a prospective customer, the sensible cost comparison includes the work needed to connect systems, establish definitions and teach people to use the result.
Now the numbers can answer back
Strata’s own infrastructure has needed updating. Its March 2025 Snowflake announcement described moving beyond limitations of legacy on-premise SQL Server databases as customer data requirements grew. The collaboration connects financial, operational, clinical and claims information, with standardization central to making comparisons useful.
In September 2026, Strata launched Financial Decision Intelligence inside StrataJazz. Command Center highlights signals that deserve attention; Ask Strata lets finance teams investigate in plain language. Both use the financial definitions and logic already established within the platform.
The dependency is familiar. Disputed definitions will still need resolving. Leaders still need the authority and willingness to act. Strata’s careers page emphasizes learning, including structured onboarding and development resources; its customer examples show why teaching matters just as much outside the company. The thirty-minute report is attractive. The organization capable of trusting it is the harder thing to build.