Community Care Managed Housing Accommodation Better With Budgetly

Sunrise2Sunrise Community Care is a dedicated NDIS service provider that provides many types of support services to their community. One of their services is supporting people with disabilities in their housing accommodation. 

As the company and number of houses grew they were looking for a better way to manage their funds for their housing accommodation.

Each accommodation was allocated a fortnightly budget for items such as food, stationeries and social activities for clients in the house. Besides that, funds were also given to their managers for meeting with clients and catching up with their support staff in cafes.  

The company operated on a simple but highly manual process, and it proved to be complicated for a few reasons:

• Lengthy application and approval times: House managers would have to send in a money request for the funds and wait for approvals from their manager. It was a process that would often take days, which wasn’t ideal especially when ad-hoc funds were needed. 

• Hassle in obtaining funds once approved: Once approved, staff would have to go to the ATM to withdraw the money. To reduce trips to the ATM, they would usually withdraw more cash and use it as petty cash for their fortnightly expenses, which wasn’t ideal. 

• Hassle in reconciling petty cash: Staff would keep the petty cash in the house and reconcile their expenses in ledgers every fortnight. This ledger will then be sent via email along with the receipts. While this may seem simple enough, it was a tricky process that took up a lot of time from staff. 

Our Solution

Budgetly’s prepaid corporate card was used in 27 housing accommodations managed by Sunrise2Sunrise Community Care. These prepaid corporate cards were given to the company’s service managers, house managers, and office staff. It also came equipped with an expense management software that’s usable on a mobile app, desktop, and laptop.  

Using the mobile app, Sunrise2Sunrise Community Care staff can now skip the lengthy application and approval process every fortnight by capturing receipts using their phone. Their transactions were recorded and automatically reconciled on the Budgetly app.

Example of the Budgetly app

As the Managing Director, Ravi Bhatt and the accounts team can view all staff transactions on Budgetly’s software in real-time, which gives him better control and visibility. 

Additionally, Budgetly has also simplified how the funds were managed for each house. For example, when setting a new budget every fortnight, Ravi and his finance team can now choose to reset the budget instead of letting it roll over to the next fortnight, so they can now choose how the money is budgeted. 

All expenses are easily reconciled with Xero, the accounting software used by Sunrise2Sunrise Community Care. 

Results 

With Budgetly, Sunrise2Sunrise Community Care saves at least 30 hours a week in admin time spent managing, allocating, and reconciling expenses for each of their houses. 

“I’ve always wanted to use an electronic solution that streamlined our expense management process. I used to pay a full-time person to only work on reconciling my company’s expenses for me, and now I just get the same person to work only 8 hours a week for any administrative work, which is a significant drop.” 

Ravi Bhatt

Sunrise2Sunrise Community Care could also easily set budgets for each of their housing accommodations. As the budget owner, Ravi and his accounts team has full control over how much to allocate for each staff member and house respectively. 

“If my staff need extra funds, it’s very easy and quick to create the budget for it and give them access as a member, so it works really really well for us. Besides that, Budgetly has also given me more visibility on the expenses for each house. For example, now if there is a complaint on the food, I can easily go through my Budgetly account and see what exactly was bought during that day.” 

Ravi Bhatt

I chose Budgetly because their customer service was really good. Plus, their software is easy to use and cost-effective. I’d definitely recommend Budgetly to other NDIS service providers. 

Ravi Bhatt

For more information on Budgetly and how we work, schedule a demo with us today, or watch a 10-minute recorded demo.