Care staff should not be doing expense admin
Aged care workers have one of the most demanding jobs in healthcare. They manage medication, personal care, meals, activities, and emotional support for residents across long shifts. The last thing they need is expense paperwork.
Yet in most aged care facilities, care staff are also responsible for collecting receipts, submitting reimbursement claims, and tracking petty cash. A carer who buys incontinence supplies at the pharmacy on the way to their shift is expected to keep the receipt, submit it to the facility manager, and wait for reimbursement.
The receipt often does not survive the shift. The reimbursement takes weeks. The carer stops claiming and absorbs the cost, or stops making the purchase entirely, which means the resident goes without.
The expense challenges specific to aged care
Shift-based staffing complicates tracking. Care staff work rotating shifts across multiple facilities. A carer who works at Facility A on Monday and Facility B on Wednesday might make purchases for both. Attributing expenses to the right facility requires manual sorting that the finance team performs at month-end, often from memory or incomplete notes.
Resident-specific purchases need documentation. Some expenses are for individual residents (personal items, specific dietary needs, outings). These need to be tracked separately from general facility expenses for family reporting and regulatory compliance. Without a system that captures this attribution at the point of purchase, the finance team reconstructs it later, which is time-consuming and error-prone.
Multiple small purchases add up. Pharmacy runs, grocery top-ups, activity supplies, transport for residents. Each purchase is small ($10-50) but the volume across a facility is significant. A facility with 40 residents might process 200+ small purchases per month. When these are handled through petty cash or reimbursements, the documentation gaps compound quickly.
Regulatory scrutiny is increasing. The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission expects providers to demonstrate responsible financial management. Missing receipts and undocumented spending create compliance risk during audits. Providers who cannot produce complete records face questions that are difficult to answer after the fact.
What per-facility expense management looks like
The shift replaces petty cash and reimbursements with per-facility cards and automatic tracking:
Each facility gets its own budget. A 40-bed facility has different expense needs than a 20-bed facility. Each budget reflects the facility’s size, resident mix, and operational requirements.
Cards for facility managers and senior carers. Instead of petty cash or personal spending, authorised staff get Visa debit cards linked to their facility’s budget. The facility manager controls who has a card and what they can spend.
Receipt capture during the shift. The carer taps the card at the pharmacy, photographs the receipt on their phone, and the transaction is documented. No paperwork at the end of the shift. No reimbursement claim to submit.
Resident-specific tagging. Purchases for individual residents can be tagged at the point of capture. This creates a per-resident expense record for family reporting and regulatory compliance.
Real-time visibility for management. The operations manager sees spending across all facilities in real time. No waiting for monthly reports to discover that Facility C has overspent on supplies.
Compliance and family reporting
Families of aged care residents increasingly expect transparency about how their loved one’s funds are managed. Some facilities manage resident trust funds or comfort funds that require detailed accounting.
With every purchase documented digitally from the moment of purchase, facilities can:
- Provide families with itemised statements of resident-specific expenses
- Demonstrate to auditors that funds were spent appropriately
- Show clear separation between facility operating expenses and resident-specific spending
- Recover GST credits on eligible purchases (which are lost when receipts go missing)
The compliance benefit is particularly valuable during Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission audits. Auditors expect to see clear documentation of how funds are managed, and providers who can produce complete, timestamped records with receipts attached demonstrate a level of financial governance that manual systems cannot match. The difference between producing a digital report in seconds and reconstructing records from paper files over several days is significant, both for the audit outcome and for the staff time involved.
For facilities managing resident trust funds, the ring-fenced budget structure ensures that trust fund spending is completely separate from operating expenses. Each trust fund operates as its own budget with its own transaction history, making it straightforward to produce the statements that families and regulators require.
Oonah Health and Community Services simplified their reconciliation and card management after switching to automated tracking, making compliance reporting straightforward.
The numbers from aged care and healthcare providers
- SOMAI Pharmaceuticals: 8 hours per month saved on reconciliation
- Arkana Energy Group: Non-essential spending reduced by up to 50%
- Brown Nurses: Moved to complete expense automation
- Manning Support Services: Hours saved on receipt chasing
- Oonah Health and Community Services: Simplified reconciliation and card management
The common thread is that care staff spend less time on admin and more time on residents. Finance teams spend less time chasing and more time managing.
The financial impact extends to GST recovery. Aged care facilities make hundreds of small purchases each month, and when receipts go missing from petty cash or reimbursement claims, the GST credits are lost. With digital receipt capture at the point of purchase, every eligible credit is captured automatically. For a facility spending $15,000 per month on supplies and operations, even a modest improvement in receipt capture can recover hundreds of dollars per quarter in previously lost credits.
Transaction data syncs to Xero automatically, which means the facility’s finance team or external accountant receives clean, categorised data. This reduces the time spent on month-end reconciliation and makes it straightforward to produce the financial reports that facility managers, boards, and regulators require.
For providers managing multiple facilities, the ability to see all spending on a single dashboard replaces the need for facility-by-facility bank statement reviews. Each facility operates as its own budget with its own cards and controls, while the central finance team maintains oversight across the entire organisation.
For a broader look at healthcare expense management, see the healthcare practice expense management guide. For the full healthcare feature set, visit the healthcare expense management solution page.
