CareShift Care Operations

Background

A care provider with a dozen support workers runs an eight step week. A client joins, staff get rostered, care gets delivered, pay gets worked out, staff get paid, money gets claimed from a government portal, someone watches whether the business is still solvent, and at some point an auditor asks for proof. Today those eight steps live across a handful of spreadsheets, a messaging group, paper notes, an accounting package and two government portals. The seams between them are manual, and the manual seams are where the money and the compliance risk sit.

The problem

What made it hard.

The hard part is not any single step. It is that the three numbers a provider needs at the same moment live in three different systems. The rostering tool knows the hours. The accounting package knows the pay run, but only after the fortnight has closed. The funding portal knows the invoice, but only after the claim is lodged. So the question that actually matters, what this shift costs against what it claims, cannot be answered at the moment the shift is being scheduled. It gets answered weeks later, in a spreadsheet, when nothing can be changed.

Why now

What changed underneath them.

Two things changed underneath small providers. Support at Home replaced Home Care Packages from November 2025, which gave many providers a second funding stream to reconcile alongside NDIS, with its own service types and its own claiming path. At the same time, award compliance became something a provider has to be able to evidence rather than assert, and a roster kept in a spreadsheet does not evidence anything. Providers of one to twenty workers are the ones caught: too small for enterprise workforce management, too regulated for a spreadsheet.

Approach

What we built.

We built the front end first and nothing else. Eight screens covering the whole week, running on simulated data in the browser, with a cost engine shaped like the SCHADS award and a claim engine mapped to support items. The screen the concept lives or dies on is Add Shift: pick a worker, a client, a day and a time, and the true cost, the claim value and the margin appear together and recalculate as you change anything. Move a weekday shift to Sunday and the margin visibly collapses. That single interaction is the product hypothesis, and it can be tested with real operators before a line of backend is written.

Integration reality

Researched, not connected.

Every integration this product would need has a known, documented path, and none of them are connected in this demo. Payroll would go to Xero through their published API and app partner process. Support at Home claiming would go through the Services Australia business to government developer portal. NDIS claiming works today with a bulk payment request file, which is what the demo generates. Direct NDIA API submission requires Digital Partnership Office approval that we have not applied for. We researched the paths before building the screens, so the demo never shows a flow that could not exist.