How a national group of nursing homes cut agency reliance and simplified payroll

The challenge: agency costs climbing, payroll taking hours

Before Syncurio, our client faced a familiar problem. Agency costs kept creeping up, but it wasn’t clear why. Payroll approval was a manual, time-consuming process. And when staffing issues arose, managers were reacting to symptoms rather than addressing root causes.

Its Managing Director needed visibility across his four homes without being on-site every day. The previous system worked as a database, but offered little in the way of actionable reporting.

When he wanted to understand staffing patterns or compare actual spend against budget, he had to export data and build spreadsheets manually.“I ended up with this network of spreadsheets that all talked to each other, pulling data from each other. It worked for a while, but it wasn’t scalable” , he told us.

The result was hours spent reconciling numbers, and still no clear answer to the question: why are we using so many agency workers?

Cutting agency reliance by understanding where the gaps are

In care homes, agency spend often signals a deeper problem – recruitment gaps, uneven shift coverage, or staffing imbalances between roles. But without clear data, it’s almost impossible to pinpoint the cause. Syncurio’s payroll reporting changed that for this organisation.

The report shows staffing requirements based on budget, compares them against actual contracted hours, and highlights the difference — by department, by role, and across the whole home.

“I can see we’re missing 100 hours of care staff. That explains why we needed agency last week. So now I can have a conversation with the manager: what are we doing about recruitment? Do we need to boost the advert? Do we need head office support?”

Instead of reacting to agency invoices after the fact, its MD can now see the recruitment gaps that are driving agency use, and address them directly. The visibility means managers are held accountable, but also supported with the information they need to fix the underlying issue.

When staffing is balanced and gaps are filled with permanent hires rather than agency cover, costs come down, and his homes’ shift coverage becomes more consistent.

Simplifying payroll: from hours of reconciliation to a clear weekly report

Staffing is typically around 80% of a care home’s costs. Getting it wrong by even 10% can be the difference between profit and loss. Yet without the right tools, it’s easy for payroll to drift — a few extra hours here, an unplanned shift there — until the monthly accounts reveal a problem that’s already happened.

Syncurio connects the staffing budget, the roster, and the payroll report into one workflow. Managers build rosters against a defined budget. At the end of each week, the payroll report shows exactly how actual hours compare to what was planned – broken down by department and role.

“The payroll report tells me: you’re 200 over this week. I can drill down and see it’s coming from 60 extra nursing hours, 160 hours on carers etc.
Then I ask the manager: why? Was it sickness cover? Recruitment gaps? Now we’re talking about the real issue, not just a number on a spreadsheet.”

This visibility has a compounding effect. When managers know their payroll is being reviewed against budget each week – and that any variance will prompt a conversation – they roster more carefully. Overstaffing and under-budgeted shifts get caught early, before they become entrenched patterns.

For this client, it means approving payroll takes minutes rather than hours. The data is already reconciled. The variances are already highlighted. He can focus on the exceptions rather than re-checking every line.

Getting invoicing right — and making aged debt manageable

Next we discussed resident billing within his group.

You’ll know care home billing is uniquely complex. A single resident might have three or four funding sources: council, NHS, family contribution, and the resident themselves. Fees change. Backdated adjustments arrive months later. Without a system designed for this complexity, invoicing errors pile up  and chasing aged debt becomes guesswork.

When the MD joined the organisation, his accounting system showed £300,000 in outstanding debt. But when he tried to collect, the numbers didn’t match what funders had on record. 

The data was wrong, and there was no way to prove otherwise.

“Now my finance director knows, to the penny, every day, what we’re owed — and by whom. When someone queries an invoice, they can show them exactly what’s happened and why. Aged debt went from hundreds of thousands to effectively zero.”

Syncurio handles multi-funding sources with a grid that tracks each funder’s contribution over time, including all the backdated changes. Invoices are accurate. Queries can be resolved quickly. And finance teams can chase what’s owed because they can prove it.

The outcome: less firefighting, more control

For this scaling care home operator, Syncurio replaced a patchwork of spreadsheets and manual processes with a single system that connects staffing, payroll, and billing. The result is less time spent on admin, clearer conversations with managers, and faster action on the issues that affect profitability.

Agency reliance is down because recruitment gaps are visible and addressed. Payroll approval is faster because variances are highlighted automatically. Aged debt is under control because invoicing is accurate from the start.

Operators using Syncurio’s reporting typically unlock between 10 and 20% in incremental EBITDA — not by working harder, but by having the visibility to act on problems before they compound.

See how Syncurio can help you reduce agency costs and simplify payroll with our care home finance reporting.