Customer story

Support at Home, 100 Times Easier

Ideally Home Care · Kate, Finance Manager

Care type

Home care & Support at Home

Care platform

Lookout

Finance platform

Xero

Kate runs the full finance function at Ideally Home Care, from processing supplier invoices and paying suppliers to claiming services for clients at the Services Australia level and preparing their statements. The bulk of her role is processing third-party invoices, and Support at Home changed what that takes.

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The challenge

Under the old funding model, invoicing was straightforward. A single total per supplier was enough, and the numbers went out on a spreadsheet.

“Before Support at Home, it wasn’t hard to process invoices. You did a total, you sent it on an Excel. It was very simple.”

Kate

Support at Home raised the bar. Claims now have to be made per line, with quantities, not as a single total at the end of the month. Kate’s old setup could not keep up, and the purchase order system she needed for budgeting was simply too manual to use.

“Before Invoice Harbour, we could not use the PO system. It was just too manually labour intensive. Each invoice had to be downloaded and uploaded multiple times.”

Kate

The workaround was manual bulk uploads through separate software, and those could only carry total invoice amounts, never the quantities Support at Home requires. Without usable purchase orders, budgeting suffered.

What changed

Now Kate’s morning is a single, simple routine. Invoices come straight into Invoice Harbour, and the ones that match their purchase order are published to both systems at once.

“I send all of my invoices straight to Invoice Harbour. I go through each of them in a date range, and the ones that match perfectly I publish. It publishes to Lookout for billing and to Xero for paying the suppliers at the same time.”

Kate

When something does not line up, Kate does not have to stop everything. A built-in flag lets her park an invoice, note why, and check with her care managers or clients before publishing.

“Any invoice that has a discrepancy, where it doesn’t exactly match the PO, I can flag. I write why I haven’t published it, go and check, and once I’ve got the answer I come back and publish it.”

Kate

And nothing gets lost after the fact. Everything published stays searchable, so a query about a payment or charge takes seconds to answer.

“Once you’ve published it, it’s still there in a published folder with some great search options. If people query payments or charges, you can easily go back and locate the invoice in question.”

Kate

The outcome

Line-by-line claiming, once impossible, is now the default. The PO system Kate could never use is working, and the month-end scramble is gone.

“It’s literally made Support at Home 100 times easier, because of that claiming per line versus a bulk invoice at the end of the month.”

Kate

In Kate’s words

“I don’t know how I could have done invoicing without something like Invoice Harbour.”

Kate Harriot

Finance Manager · Ideally Home Care