Customer story

Taking on Self-Managed Clients Again

101 Home Care · Geoff Doherty, Owner

Care type

Home care & Support at Home

Care platform

Lookout

Finance platform

Xero

Clients

Around 250

Geoff Doherty owns 101 Home Care, a provider servicing around 250 clients across Australia. He looks at the business the way an owner does, through the lens of margin, and under Support at Home the numbers were pointing him away from self-managed clients. They cost more to administer and returned less. Fixing that turned out to be a finance problem.

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The challenge

Efficiency has always mattered to Geoff. Under Support at Home, it matters more.

“As a business owner, we’re always looking for efficiencies, because efficiencies increase your margins. That’s never been as important as it is now in the aged care sector, where everything is being tightened.”

Geoff Doherty

The complexity landed squarely on finance. Every service now has to be mapped to a particular code, and at 250 clients that is a lot of mapping.

“Support at Home introduced a lot of complexities into running a home care business. One of the biggest ones was the financing, and how to map each service to a particular code.”

Geoff Doherty

The obvious answer was more headcount, and 101 Home Care was close to committing to it.

“We were actually looking to take on another finance person to manage this process.”

Geoff Doherty

The same complexity was quietly shaping who 101 Home Care would take on as a client. Self-managed clients cost more to administer and return less, so the business was pulling back from them.

“Under the new Support at Home, we were reluctant to take on any more self-managed clients, simply because of the complexity in processing invoices and the lower margins.”

Geoff Doherty

What changed

The mapping that was going to justify a new hire is now automatic, and it runs end to end, from the purchase order through to publishing into Lookout and Xero at once.

“Invoice Harbour has solved this by automapping certain services by certain suppliers directly to the appropriate code. It can also link straight into purchase orders, match them off, look for variations within certain tolerances, and publish both to the care platform as well as the financing system for payment.”

Geoff Doherty

Self-managed clients stopped being the hard case. The co-contribution and reimbursement work that made them expensive to service now happens as part of the same flow.

“The client co-contributions, the reimbursements, are seamless. It’s really made a huge difference.”

Geoff Doherty

What Geoff singles out is not the automation itself, but what sits behind it. Because Invoice Harbour works through Lookout, the numbers it is checking against are the live ones from Services Australia, not a stale copy.

“The really sophisticated part about Invoice Harbour is that, via our care platform, it gets real-time data from Services Australia. This includes up-to-date client account balances and co-contribution rates. So it really helps us manage the finite funding that these clients have.”

Geoff Doherty

The outcome

Self-managed clients are worth taking on again, and the extra finance hire did not happen. The transition itself, the part Geoff’s team was most worried about, turned out to be manageable.

“What Invoice Harbour has done has really reduced the anxiety in our finance team, because it was a really big task to be able to move across to this new system.”

Geoff Doherty

In Geoff’s words

“Like all businesses transitioning to Support at Home, the financing behind it was probably one of the biggest problems we were facing, and Invoice Harbour has single-handedly solved it.”

Geoff Doherty

Owner · 101 Home Care