Care Minutes Reporting Without the Spreadsheet

The quarterly surprise

Residential aged-care providers are audited on care minutes and funded on AN-ACC. Both depend on the same three sources: the roster (who worked, for how long, in which role), the clinical system (which residents, at which classification), and the Medicare statements (what was actually paid).

In most homes those three live in three systems, and the reconciliation lives in a spreadsheet. Someone exports from each, lines them up, and works out whether the home hit its target. By the time the answer is known, the period has closed and nothing can be done about it.

What the CFO asked for

I built a dashboard for a residential aged-care provider in WA whose CFO put the problem plainly: she wanted to know today whether the home was on track, not in six weeks.

The system reads the HumanForce roster, LeeCare clinical data, the Medicare statement PDFs and Xero directly. From those it calculates care minutes per resident per day, by home and by wing, against the AN-ACC targets, and puts funding exposure next to cost.

The part that changes decisions

Knowing you are under target is useful. Knowing which shifts would fix it is what changes the month.

The roster optimiser takes the current roster and shows which changes (an extra RN shift on Tuesday, moving a carer from one wing to another) move the home back over target, and what each costs. The DON can test the change before making it, instead of finding out in the next quarter's report.

The board pack

The last piece was the one that took the most hours every month: the board deck. It is now generated from the live data in one click. The CFO reviews it rather than assembles it.

What it replaced

• The quarterly spreadsheet reconciliation
• Three days a month assembling the board pack
• Decisions on roster changes made without knowing the care-minutes effect
• Finding out about a shortfall after the period closed

If you run finance or operations for a residential aged-care provider and your care-minutes reporting still lives in a spreadsheet, see what I build for aged care or book a call.