Auxilium vs the spreadsheets you have now
Most health care sharing ministries run on spreadsheets, and that is not as foolish as software vendors like to imply. Spreadsheets are free, universally understood, infinitely flexible, and nobody needs training. A great many ministries have served members well for years using nothing else.
Here is where they hold up and where they stop.
Head to head
| Capability | Auxilium | Alternative | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | ✗ | ✓ | Spreadsheets win outright. They are free and Auxilium is not. |
| Flexibility to model anything | ~ | ✓ | A spreadsheet will do whatever you want. Auxilium has opinions about households and claims. |
| Anyone can use it without training | ~ | ✓ | |
| Ad-hoc analysis on a Tuesday afternoon | ~ | ✓ | Auxilium exports, but a pivot table is faster for a one-off question. |
| Share ratio computed and benchmarked continuously | ✓ | ~ | You can compute it in a spreadsheet. Almost nobody does it monthly, every month, for years. |
| Denials automatically checked against published guidelines | ✓ | ✗ | |
| Claims escalating on their own when they breach a commitment | ✓ | ✗ | The core gap. A spreadsheet cannot notice anything. |
| Audit trail of who changed what, and when | ✓ | ✗ | Version history is not an audit trail. |
| Two people working at once without overwriting each other | ✓ | ~ | |
| Producing a claims record on demand for a hospital | ✓ | ~ |
The honest summary
A spreadsheet is a record of what you decided. It cannot tell you what you have forgotten, and it will never interrupt you.
That distinction stops mattering at a certain size and then matters enormously. If your ministry is small enough that one person holds every open case in their head, a spreadsheet is genuinely fine and you should keep your money. If nobody can name every open case from memory, the gap in that table is where members start going missing.