How Muscogee Nation Built a More Efficient Operation Across 10 Casinos
With Insight Cash, MNGE standardized operations across its properties, reduced Revenue Audit staffing 43% through attrition, and cut shift-close time 75%.
The challenge
Operating multiple properties, each running its own vault system and building its own audit workbooks, left Muscogee Nation Gaming Enterprises (MNGE) with no consistent way to manage cash operations at scale. Revenue auditors spent up to an hour each day gathering and entering data before the audit work could begin, and every new vendor system meant building a new workbook and audit process.
Month-end close required all-hands weekend sessions, with audit leadership on-site for hours to manage a slow, error-prone process. Cage and Vault staff pulled banks 30 to 45 minutes before shift end to gather paperwork, and variances could add one to two hours of overtime, delaying tip-out for tipped employees. Exceptions were tracked on paper, routed between departments, and sometimes went unresolved. Regulatory audits could take nearly a week to compile documentation.
The solution
MNGE adopted Insight Cash at an enterprise level from the start, with a clear goal: standardize cash and audit operations across every property while giving leadership one consistent view into performance. As the platform matured, MNGE expanded its use beyond its original scope, extending Exceptions Management to the surveillance team’s incident reports, and eventually to compliance workflows.
The results
Staffing efficiency through attrition
Enterprise-wide, MNGE runs 93 fewer FTEs today than it did in 2016, a 29% reduction across the departments CCT touches, all through attrition. Revenue Audit is down 43%, Soft Count 48%, and Cash Operations across Vault, Cage, and Kiosk 19%. As auditors moved on, MNGE didn’t need to backfill every role, thanks to time no longer spent on manual data compilation and workbook maintenance. The same approach is being explored for overnight Cage and Vault coverage, where scheduling data shows it is no longer needed at the same levels.
Growth absorbed without adding labor
Those reductions came while the enterprise grew. Since 2016, MNGE has added the retail portion of a travel plaza, opened a new casino with 750 machines at Coweta, rebuilt Eufaula into a new facility that doubled its game count, and added a mobile gaming app to the audit scope. Its Planning and Analysis group absorbed all of it with no change in headcount, and every department CCT touches carries excess capacity for growth.
Kiosk operations followed the same pattern: when Insight Cash went in, a dedicated kiosk team ran three shifts at the flagship River Spirit Casino (RSC) in Tulsa. With the data available and time to examine it, MNGE reworked its kiosk process and absorbed the three-shift team into vault staff. What was once a site-by-site drop and count team model has since consolidated into a single shared-service team: one crew covering RSC and Suite Shots, and another covering the remaining nine properties.
Shift close, transformed
Cage and Vault staff cut shift-close time by an estimated 75%: work that used to be a scramble to gather documents and get the numbers right is now organized and front-loaded.
Compliance audits, simplified
Preparing for a compliance or regulatory audit once took up to a week of pulling documents from folders across departments; it now takes about three hours to run the reports from the system. The old process meant requesting boxes from storage, waiting for teams to locate the box and find the paperwork, then scanning it to deliver electronically to internal and external auditors.
“Previously, it might take a week or so gathering everything. Now it might take a few dedicated hours to run the reports they need.”
Enterprise-wide standardization and Exceptions Management
Before Insight Cash, MNGE’s properties weren’t just running different vault systems; the audit function itself was segregated by property, with each site posting its own journal entries, running its own reconciliations, and preparing its own state fees and vendor commission payments. Standing the platform up enterprise-wide gave every property a shared source of truth, and centralization followed.
Exceptions Management pushed that standardization further: instead of ten properties tracking issues ten different ways, every site now flags, routes, and resolves exceptions through the same workflow. That gave leadership visibility into cross-site trends for the first time: supporting employee evaluations and surfacing recurring issues before they became bigger problems. It also freed management from routine oversight into investigation.
The standardization didn’t stop at software: MNGE formally rewrote each property’s internal controls books, so every process runs identically across all ten locations.
Paper and storage savings
Eliminating paper-based workflows freed up space and reduced document-handling overhead. Where a single storage box once held about a day’s worth of records, that same box now holds four days’ worth, a 75% cut in storage space, with print, ink, and retention costs dropping alongside it.
“All the data is just sitting there. There’s no point in printing it off. There’s no point in doing all these extra steps. It’s all right here at my fingertips.”
A foundation for bigger work
The most significant outcome wasn’t a process change; it was a shift in mission. With routine audit work streamlined, Muscogee retired the “Revenue Auditor” title in favor of broader data-stewardship responsibilities, renamed the department simply “Audit,” and renamed its FP&A function “Data Analysts.” Time spent compiling and re-entering data now goes to data quality and standardization, which Jess calls the biggest impact to the enterprise.
The team began auditing its existing applications for data points it wasn’t capturing and put members through an introductory SQL course with Oklahoma State University. Jess found that most systems were underutilized rather than incapable: when a data point was missing, an existing field could capture it. The internal conversation has since moved from “the system doesn’t have that” to “let’s capture that data point here.”
“The more we show what’s possible, the more people suggest the ‘what ifs,’ and then we go do it.”
Looking ahead
When the enterprise opened its tenth property in Coweta, Insight Cash went in from day one. With every property now running identical processes, MNGE is positioned to cross-train staff across facilities in a way ten separate playbooks never allowed. Leadership describes ROI that extends past audit, into vault, cage, food & beverage, and data and analytics, driven by the time the platform frees up for higher-value work.
“Since a material amount of our time shifted away from paperwork and manual processes, we’ve been able to explore what’s possible, and that’s pushed the whole enterprise to become data driven.”