The shared card problem in healthcare
Most medical practices and aged care providers manage expenses with one or two bank credit cards shared across the practice. The practice manager holds the card. Nurses, admin staff, and care workers borrow it when they need to make a purchase.
The problems are familiar:
- Nobody knows who made which purchase until someone investigates
- Receipts get lost between the clinic and the office
- The practice manager spends hours each month reconciling the card statement
- Budget visibility only arrives at month-end, after the money is spent
For single-location practices, this is manageable but inefficient. For providers running multiple clinics or aged care facilities, it becomes a serious operational burden.
Where healthcare expense management differs
Healthcare practices have expense patterns that differ from other industries:
Medical supplies and pharmaceuticals. Regular purchases from medical suppliers, pharmacies, and equipment providers. These need to be tracked by location and sometimes by patient or program. A multi-location practice might have different supply needs at each clinic, and the finance team needs to see which location is driving costs without waiting for month-end reconciliation.
Staff across multiple locations. A provider running three clinics has staff making purchases at each location. Without per-location tracking, the finance team cannot see which clinic is spending what. This becomes especially challenging when staff rotate between locations, as purchases made at one clinic might be attributed to the wrong cost centre.
Compliance documentation. Healthcare providers face regulatory requirements around financial management. Aged care providers in particular need to demonstrate that resident funds are managed appropriately. The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission expects clear documentation of how funds are allocated and spent, and incomplete records create risk during audits.
Small, frequent purchases. Clinic supplies, cleaning products, patient comfort items, staff meals during long shifts. Each is small individually but adds up to significant monthly spending. A busy clinic might process 50 to 100 small purchases per month, and without a system to capture them at the point of purchase, the finance team is left reconstructing from bank statements.
SOMAI Pharmaceuticals found that reconciliation alone consumed 8 hours per month before they automated their expense tracking.
What changes with per-team expense management
The shift follows the same pattern that works across industries: replace shared cards with individual cards, per-location budgets, and automatic receipt capture.
Each clinic or facility gets its own budget. The main practice has a different expense profile than the satellite clinic. Each location’s budget reflects its size, staffing, and patient volume.
Individual cards for authorised staff. The practice manager, head nurse, and facility coordinator each get their own card. Purchases are attributed to the right person and location automatically.
Receipt capture at the point of purchase. Staff photograph receipts on their phone. The receipt is matched to the transaction, categorised, and available for reporting immediately. This eliminates the end-of-month scramble to locate receipts and match them to bank statement entries, which is where most healthcare practices lose the most time.
Real-time visibility for the practice owner. A single dashboard shows spending across all locations, all staff, and all categories. No waiting for bank statements. The practice owner or finance manager can see exactly where money is being spent and intervene early if a location is trending over budget.
Manning Support Services, which operates across healthcare and community services, saved hours on chasing receipts after switching to automated tracking.
Aged care: resident fund accountability
Aged care providers face additional requirements around resident funds. Families and regulators expect clear documentation of how funds allocated to resident care are spent.
The same per-facility budget structure that works for clinic expenses works for resident care funds. Each facility gets its own budget. Purchases made on behalf of residents are documented with receipts at the point of purchase. Reporting by facility, category, and date range is available instantly.
This level of documentation is particularly important when families ask for an accounting of how their loved one’s comfort funds or care funds have been spent. Instead of reconstructing records from bank statements and paper receipts, the facility manager can generate a report that shows every purchase, with the receipt attached, filtered by resident and date range. The transparency builds trust with families and reduces the time spent responding to enquiries.
For providers operating across both healthcare and aged care, the ability to manage all locations on a single platform means the finance team does not need to maintain separate systems for different parts of the business. Each location operates as its own budget with its own cards, while the central team maintains oversight across the entire organisation.
Arkana Energy Group, which operates across NDIS and healthcare, reduced non-essential spending by up to 50% after implementing spend controls.
The numbers from healthcare providers
- SOMAI Pharmaceuticals: 8 hours per month saved on reconciliation
- Arkana Energy Group: Non-essential spending reduced by up to 50%
- Manning Support Services: Hours saved on receipt chasing
- Brown Nurses: Moved to complete expense automation
- Oonah Health and Community Services: Simplified reconciliation and card management
The pattern is consistent: shared cards are replaced with individual cards, manual reconciliation is replaced with automatic tracking, and the practice manager reclaims hours each month.
The financial benefit goes beyond time savings. When every purchase has a receipt attached, GST credits are captured automatically. Healthcare practices that previously lost credits due to missing documentation find that BAS preparation becomes a straightforward data export. For practices spending $20,000 or more per month on supplies and operations, the recovered GST credits alone can be substantial.
Transaction data syncs to Xero automatically, which means the practice’s accountant or bookkeeper receives clean, categorised data rather than raw bank feeds. This reduces the cost of external accounting services and speeds up month-end close. For practices that manage their own budgets across multiple locations, the ability to see all spending on a single dashboard replaces the need for location-by-location bank statement reviews.
For the full healthcare feature set, visit the healthcare expense management solution page. For a broader look at how expense management software replaces manual processes, see the product overview.
