Syntellis Performance Solutions and the price of waiting for a number

At Hospital Sisters Health System, the curious number was two. In a published Axiom customer account, the system had grown to 15 hospitals across Illinois and Wisconsin, while its corporate finance team still consisted of two people. A hospital system can acquire another hospital. It cannot acquire another Tuesday afternoon.

Before Axiom, managers needed information from several systems, sometimes without permission to enter those systems themselves. Requests landed with corporate finance. Getting the numbers could take days or weeks. The difficulty was ordinary enough to be overlooked: the people who needed an answer depended on somebody else to fetch it.

• The job: connect budgets, forecasts, costs, and financial reports.
• The buyers: hospitals, banks, credit unions, and universities.
• The distinction: industry-specific planning alongside financial and operational analytics.
• The ownership: acquired by Roper in 2023 and combined with Strata Decision Technology.

Syntellis Performance Solutions sold a way out of that queue. Its Axiom software gave the HSHS team a framework for reports that managers could refresh themselves. The customer account credits the system with saving hundreds of work hours. That is a more useful beginning for understanding Syntellis than a list of fashionable software adjectives.

Fifteen hospitals, two people, one queue

Enterprise performance management is an ungainly name for a practical ambition: make the organization’s financial picture usable. A general ledger records transactions. Planning software asks what those transactions imply for staffing, spending, revenue, and next year’s choices. Syntellis’s work sits in that second conversation.

The distinction matters because a financial fact has a shelf life. A number that arrives after the staffing decision can explain the outcome beautifully and influence it very little. Reporting delays therefore have a cost even when nobody records that cost as a separate expense.

The useful question for a prospective buyer is wonderfully prosaic: how many people must handle a routine request before the person asking can act? Count the handoffs. Then count the occasions when the same report is rebuilt. That exercise is an editorial reading of the customer examples, and a sensible way to test whether a planning system would solve an actual problem.

A new company with old roots

Syntellis was announced in June 2020 as a standalone business carved out of Kaufman Hall’s software division. Kermit Randa, who led that division, became CEO. Thoma Bravo and Madison Dearborn Partners supplied investment backing; investor records put the completed separation in August.

The new company combined Axiom with Connected Analytics, a practice acquired from Change Healthcare. Its name joined “synthesis” and “intelligence.” A perfectly serviceable corporate invention, though the more interesting synthesis was operational: established products and expertise assembled into a business devoted to software and data.

The pandemic gave that focus an immediate purpose. In a later interview, Randa described demand for better financial management and scenario modeling amid uncertainty. Starting a new company in 2020 was awkward. Selling institutions a way to revise their assumptions was rather well timed.

Three industries, three kinds of arithmetic

Hospitals, universities, and banks share a need for budgets. Their budgets behave differently. Hospital finance turns on service volumes, staffing, care costs, and reimbursement. A university must connect enrollment and tuition to faculty, grants, facilities, and commitments. A bank needs to understand cash flows, funding costs, and the profitability of relationships.

Axiom’s portfolio reflects those differences. The Healthcare Suite links budgeting and financial planning with cost accounting and decision support. Higher Education tools include tuition revenue, labor, strategic financial, and capital planning. Financial Institutions products include forecasting, funds transfer pricing, and profitability analysis. Implementation and support help customers configure those tools around their own processes.

Consider tuition. Axiom Tuition Revenue Planning, announced in July 2023, models enrollment fluctuations, differential tuition rates, and student melt: students who were expected to arrive but do not. It can use student-level data and carry assumptions into operating budgets and long-range plans. A tuition forecast becomes more revealing when it can show which assumption moved the result.

Capital planning extends the same logic over several years. The higher education product evaluates projects against balance-sheet, cash-flow, and activity-statement effects, with requests and approvals tracked through the process. A building’s ribbon-cutting is a date. Its financial consequences occupy a calendar.

For banks, funds transfer pricing helps allocate the economics of funding across lending, deposit gathering, and risk management. Axiom’s tools work at account or instrument level, while relationship pricing can include costs, loan-loss provisions, and capital considerations. Revenue alone offers an incomplete portrait of a customer’s contribution.

Eastern Bank’s published customer story illustrates the everyday version of that problem. More than 200 branch managers and executives needed reports. Axiom consolidated information that had previously been combined manually, and the bank used the platform to bring profitability into a business-line view. Its finance team could also evaluate proposed capital spending with greater financial context.

The appeal of a boring migration

At Hackensack Meridian Health, nearly 2,000 people touched budget documents during peak season. The health system consolidated budgeting and moved to Axiom Cloud in 2018, before Syntellis existed as a standalone company. Users could access a common version from different locations, with changes governed by permissions.

“Users didn’t even know we moved to Axiom Cloud.”

Steve Esposito · Hackensack Meridian Health

That remark from the customer account is appealing precisely because it lacks drama. Finance teams have deadlines. Familiarity can be a feature when a migration would otherwise require thousands of people to relearn a seasonal routine.

The University of North Texas System reported a different benefit: scenario work that had taken days could be done in minutes after implementing Axiom Long-Range Planning. It wanted a transparent, integrated process connecting budgets, accounting, financial reporting, and strategy. The improvement was useful because leaders could examine alternatives while the discussion was still happening.

There is a social problem here as well as a technical one. Western Kentucky University’s Renaldo Domoney described discussions getting caught on the provenance of numbers. Shared data changed the conversation. His formulation was concise:

“When we all see the same numbers, we can start talking strategy.”

Renaldo Domoney · Western Kentucky University

Why the buyer kept calling

Syntellis also moved beyond internal planning. Its August 2022 acquisition of Stratasan added healthcare market intelligence: information for deciding where, when, and how to grow. Comparative Analytics supplied another outside view. A February 2024 release described benchmarking coverage drawn from more than 1,300 hospitals and 135,000 physicians. Those are dated data-coverage figures, rather than a count of paying customers.

In a 2023 investor podcast, A.J. Rohde recalled that Roper approached owners who initially preferred to keep Syntellis. He said the buyer ultimately met expectations on value, timing, and certainty. That is the investors’ account of why they changed course; it should be read with their interest in the transaction in mind.

The acquisition closed on August 7, 2023. Sellers announced a $1.4 billion enterprise value. Roper announced a $1.25 billion net purchase price, including a $135 million tax benefit. The figures describe different measures of the deal. Roper combined Syntellis with Strata, retained the Strata Decision Technology name, and put the combined business under John Martino.

The business model helps explain the attraction: enterprise software and cloud subscriptions, with implementation, support, and analytics services. Roper specifically cited a high recurring revenue mix and strong customer retention. For customers evaluating Axiom, the purchase process begins with a scoped sales conversation and demo.

What the finance team can copy

Syntellis occupies a specialist position in enterprise planning. Workday Adaptive Planning also publishes healthcare budgeting and modeling use cases; Oracle Cloud EPM describes higher education planning and integration. Industry specialization therefore needs to be evaluated in the details: costing methods, tuition assumptions, account-level profitability, and the work required to connect existing systems.

The repeatable lesson in these customer stories is to fix the route from data to decision. Build reports that the intended users can refresh. Keep scenario assumptions visible. Test whether a routine answer can be obtained without a finance specialist reconstructing it each time.

That approach depends on groundwork. As a practical inference, inconsistent inputs or disputed allocation rules can weaken any shared model. Permissions must match responsibilities, and managers must use the process. Automation can distribute a calculation quickly; the institution still has to decide whether the calculation represents its business.

Axiom’s public Budget Planning and Performance Reporting help lists a September 2026 patch and support for years with 27 pay periods. It is an appropriately modest detail to end on. Planning software earns its place through such particulars: the extra payroll period, the changed enrollment assumption, the manager who can finally run the report without joining a queue.