Jump to the bottom to hear Justin explain this.
If you’re reviewing your hospice’s financials every month and feeling reasonably good about the numbers, you might still be missing a serious problem. Your P&L can look fine and still be hiding inefficiencies that are quietly costing you tens of thousands of dollars a year. Why? Because your internal statements only tell you what happened — they don’t tell you whether what happened was good.
That gap is exactly what MVI benchmarking reports are designed to close.
Your Financials Are a Mirror. Benchmarking Is a Scoreboard.
Looking at your income statement in isolation is like judging your race time without knowing what anyone else ran. You might have finished in 22 minutes and feel great — until you find out the field average was 18.
MVI benchmarking reports pull performance data from hospices across the country and give you a standardized way to compare your numbers against peers of similar size and geography. Instead of just seeing “our labor costs were $X this month,” you see whether that cost is above, at, or below the industry benchmark — and by how much.
That shift in perspective changes everything about how you read your financial data.
What MVI Benchmarking Actually Measures
MVI reports cover the operational and financial metrics that drive hospice performance. The areas that matter most:
- Labor costs as a percentage of revenue. Labor is the largest line item in any hospice budget. Benchmarking tells you whether your ratios are competitive or whether you’re carrying more cost than peer agencies at your census level.
- Nursing productivity. Are your nurses hitting industry-standard visit volumes? Underutilization here has a direct impact on profitability that doesn’t always show up clearly in a traditional P&L.
- Average daily census (ADC) and visit utilization. How does your ADC trend compare to similar hospices? Are visits per patient per period in line with peers or running high?
- Overall margin by service line. Where is profit leaking, and how does that compare to what best-in-class operators achieve?
None of these numbers are meaningful in a vacuum. MVI gives them context.
The Four Profit Leaks Benchmarking Surfaces Immediately
In our experience working with hospice operators, four issues show up most often when we run an MVI comparison for the first time:
- Labor ratios that have crept above peer benchmarks without anyone noticing, often because the agency grew headcount in proportion to census but didn’t scrutinize productivity at the same time.
- Nursing visit frequency running higher than benchmarks — not because of clinical need, but because of scheduling inefficiency or undefined visit protocols.
- ADC that looks stable internally but is lagging behind what similar-size hospices are achieving in the same market.
- Ancillary costs (medications, equipment, contracted services) that are above benchmark, often due to vendor relationships that haven’t been renegotiated.
Each of these is fixable. But you can’t fix what you can’t see — and none of them show up clearly on a standard internal P&L.
From Data to Decision: How to Actually Use Benchmarking
The goal isn’t to benchmark for its own sake. The goal is to convert the comparison into a decision.
When you see that your labor cost percentage is 6 points above benchmark, the question becomes: is that a staffing mix issue, a scheduling issue, a productivity issue, or all three? That diagnostic conversation is where the real work happens — and where operational changes get made.
Used well, MVI reports shift your monthly financial review from backward-looking (what did we do?) to forward-looking (what do we need to change, and where?). That’s the difference between financial reporting and financial management.
How We Use MVI with Hospice Clients at Universal Bookkeeper
At Universal Bookkeeper, we incorporate MVI benchmarking into our ongoing work with hospice clients as a standard practice — not an add-on. When we review financials, we’re not just confirming that the numbers reconcile. We’re asking how those numbers compare to what high-performing hospices at similar scale are achieving.
That context helps our clients move faster. Instead of spending three months wondering whether a labor trend is a real problem or just seasonal noise, we can put it against a benchmark in the first month and know.
The question we’re always helping hospice leaders answer isn’t just “did we make money?” It’s “are we performing at the level we should be — in every area of the business — compared to organizations like ours?” That’s a much more useful question.
Want to See How Your Hospice Stacks Up?
If you’ve never run an MVI comparison against your financials, you’re almost certainly missing something. It doesn’t take long to find out — and what you find usually pays for itself quickly.
We offer a free benchmarking review for hospice operators who want to see where they stand. No commitment, no pitch — just an honest look at your numbers against the industry.
Ready to Feel More Confident?
If you’ve been avoiding your financials or feel unsure about what your numbers are telling you, you’re not alone.
And you don’t have to figure it out on your own.
At Universal Bookkeeper, we work with business owners to help them understand their numbers in a clear, practical way—so they can make better decisions and move their business forward with confidence.