Enkindle Consulting’s latest Home Care Provider Outlook Survey found that 64% of providers say their home care systems don’t meet their needs or don’t exist at all. The same figure was reported four years ago.

In between, the sector hasn’t stood still. Just over a third of providers say they’ve invested in technology and it’s working. Almost half say their current software isn’t working but they’re partway through fixing it. Add those groups together and you get a sector that’s been buying, upgrading and replacing systems continuously for years, yet somehow landing on the same number it started with.

Providers aren’t failing to invest. They’re investing and still ending up exposed in the same three places: budgeting, claiming and reporting.

Budgeting

One provider in the Enkindle survey said they’d had to fall back on Excel to calculate budgets. That’s almost certainly not an isolated case. 

The actual cost of that isn’t the time spent in the spreadsheet. It’s what the spreadsheet can’t see. Up to $1,000 or 10% of a participant’s quarterly budget rolls over to the next quarter, but anything above that is lost, and unspent funds don’t carry over into a new financial year at all. A manual tracker built around “what’s left this quarter” misses both deadlines unless someone remembers to check every participant against them, every quarter.

A system that’s doing the job updates available, committed and remaining funds automatically when a claim is submitted, against every participant, without anyone rebuilding the numbers by hand. It also keeps an eye on the two things a spreadsheet won’t catch on its own, flagging when a participant is approaching a rollover threshold or a financial year cutoff, ensuring that funds aren’t lost simply because nobody checked in time. 

Claiming

Providers told Enkindle the biggest system challenge was that functionality simply wasn’t ready for Support at Home’s launch, with integration issues and evidence capture gaps close behind. Several providers quoted in the survey are still finding missing functionality and chasing fixes months after go-live.

The cost here is concrete and unforgiving. Every service has a 60-day window from the end of the quarter to be claimed, and there’s no mechanism to recover revenue once that window closes. A system that doesn’t validate evidence before submission, produces rejections that eat further into that window while someone has to manually fix the errors and resubmit.

A system built for this checks evidence requirements before a claim ever reaches the Aged Care Provider Portal, ensuring it is completed correctly the first time. The 60-day deadline on every delivered service is tracked automatically and surfaced to someone before it closes, not left for a person to remember on a spreadsheet. It connects directly to the portal, so claims go in correctly formatted rather than bouncing back with an error code to decode.

Reporting

Enkindle also found providers have little visibility into known issues with government platforms, and that home care systems are struggling to produce accurate budgets and statements, which is showing up as confusion among participants (and a rise in complaints).

Monthly participant statements aren’t optional under Support at Home. They’re a compliance requirement, due by the last day of the following month, with specific mandatory items – including available funding, services delivered, contributions paid and remaining funding. If that statement gets built by pulling numbers from three different systems and reconciling them by hand, the version your finance team is signing off on is only as accurate as that month’s manual process, redone from scratch every single month. 

Done properly, every mandatory line item is pulled directly from the same data driving the claims and the budget, so the statement isn’t a separate task assembled after the fact. Finance teams get one real-time view of what’s been paid, what’s outstanding and what’s been rejected, instead of three exports that don’t agree with each other. 

The common thread

A third of providers say their technology is genuinely working for them. The rest are stuck or still mid-fix. As Enkindle Consulting director Jennene Buckley put it, “technology needs to carry the load so providers can operate within a complex model, and right now, that is not consistently happening”.

quickclaim closes exactly this gap – running budgeting, claiming and reporting from one system on one set of data, instead of three people each holding a piece of it.

Ready to see what effective technology actually looks like?

If any of this sounds familiar, we’d love to show you how quickclaim handles budgeting, claiming and reporting for Support at Home providers. Get in touch here.