Home care agency intake audit Everyone answers the phone. Nobody owns the inquiry. We find where the hours leak.
Inquiries nobody owns, call-offs covered with overtime, family invoices paid by check. In two weeks, from the agency’s schedule and billing, we put a monthly dollar figure on each one.
- Fixed fee
- $4,500
- Length
- Two weeks
- Access to records
- Read-only
For private-pay home care agencies doing $1M+ a year.
+1 (202) 600-6027Mon–Fri, 9 a.m.–6 p.m. ET · A real person answers or calls you back the same business day.After hours? Book the call online: one form, no calendar
Sound familiar?
What agency owners say about the money they can’t find.
01
An inquiry with no owner
Intake falls to whoever picks up, between shifts and payroll. Calling back first is nobody’s job, and the first agency to call back gets the assessment.
02
Families who go quiet after the rate
The rate and the four-hour minimum come up at the assessment, and the family goes quiet. Which ones left over price and which heard nothing back is on no list.
03
Family invoices paid when they get to it
Invoices go out by mail, checks come when they come, and payroll runs every week. Chasing a balance on 24/7 care is nobody’s set job.
04
Call-offs that turn into overtime
A caregiver calls off and the shift gets covered at time and a half, or not at all. The invoice shows the hours, not the cost of covering them.
05
Yesterday’s shifts nobody checked
Scheduled, worked and billed hours sit in different places. Checking every shift from yesterday is nobody’s job, so gaps surface on the invoice.
06
Hours a week that stop growing
The agency plateaus, and nobody can say whether calls, starts, staffing or billing is holding the hours where they are.
Paraphrased from public owner forum threads and trade-press interviews — not from our clients.
None of this is fixed by bringing in more business. Each leak sits in work already on the books.
Where it stalls
From the first call to the cleared payment: where the money stalls.
- Inquiry
- Hand-off 01 to Assessment
- Hand-off 02 to Start of care
- Hand-off 03 to Shifts
- Hand-off 04 to Invoice
- Hand-off 05 to Paid
- Hand-off 06 to Margin
- Hand-off 01 · Inquiry → Assessment
Inquiry calls with no owner and no logged callback time.
- Hand-off 02 · Assessment → Start of care
Assessments with no recorded outcome after the family hears the rate.
- Hand-off 04 · Shifts → Invoice
Call-offs covered with overtime, and shifts never checked against the invoice.
- Hand-off 05 · Invoice → Paid
Family invoices mailed and paid by check, weeks after payroll ran.
Before any new software
Large companies are spending heavily on AI. Few can show what it returned.
7%
of 2,145 senior leaders at companies with $100M+ in revenue reported having established a return on AI — while planning to spend an average of $188 million each on it.
Source: KPMG Global AI Pulse, Q2 2026
Those are companies with their own IT departments and budgets. A smaller business that buys a tool on a hunch has less room for the same mistake.
Leaders with strong visibility into costs were five times as likely to report a return on AI (15% against 3%). The same release adds that without clear ownership, decisions fragment and impact gets harder to track.
Source: KPMG Global AI Pulse, Q2 2026
Free · two taps · no email
Check one hand-off yourself, right now.
Three questions, from your own records
Of last month’s calls from unknown numbers, how many have a row in the inquiry list, and how long did each one wait for a first callback?
How many assessments last quarter ended with no recorded outcome after the family heard the rate?
How many shifts last month were covered at overtime after a call-off, and how many were left unfilled?
If an answer takes digging, note where the record lives. That is where the Review starts.
Free self-check · two taps · no email
Hand-off 1 of 6 · Inquiry → Quote
Choose the answer that sounds like your business.
That was one of six hand-offs where money changes hands, from first inquiry to collected cash. The other five take about three minutes and end in a dated sheet that names where to start.
How it runs
Two weeks, $4,500, one finding you can act on.
Day 0
A 20-minute call
Fit, not yet, or not us. No deck, no payment.
Days 1–14
We read the records
Read-only exports from the systems you already run. Nothing switched off, nothing to install.
Day 14
The findings, in writing
Each leak with a monthly dollar figure, the order to fix them in, and the first fix to start the next morning — the agency’s to keep whatever the owner decides.
$2,250 to begin, the balance when the report arrives. The fee does not change with what the Review finds, and the written report is yours to keep.
What we price
Each leak gets a monthly dollar figure.
Family inquiries in the phone log with no owner and no logged callback, the minutes each one waited, and how many never became a row in the inquiry list
Assessments where the family heard the rate and the four-hour minimum and went quiet, with no follow-up date and no recorded outcome
Family invoices mailed and paid by check, and the days from each invoice to payment set against the weekly payroll that ran first
Call-offs covered at overtime or left unfilled, and what each covered shift cost against what it billed
Scheduled, worked and billed hours set side by side for each shift, and the hours payroll paid that no invoice carried
Weekly hours by client, month by month, so the plateau shows where it sits: calls, starts, staffing or billing
Who runs it
Small on purpose. Senior on purpose.
A team with ten-plus years in strategic consulting and business-process automation. Before Lumina, our people built and ran revenue operations inside a Fortune 500 US financial institution.
Tamara Stepanyan, founder
No client case studies yet — we would rather tell you that than invent one.
Before you call
Questions agency owners ask first.
We already run WellSky (or AxisCare). Doesn’t it show all of this?
A scheduling and billing platform records the visits, hours and invoices, but each report answers its own question. The missed-call log sits in the phone system, the inquiry list in the CRM, payroll hours in one export and billed hours in another. Each one is correct on its own; the gaps sit between them. The Review reads them side by side with read-only access and puts a monthly dollar figure on each gap. Nothing gets switched off or migrated, and the fix list runs inside the platform the agency already has.
Our problem is caregivers, not clients. Why look at inquiries at all?
The staffing pressure is real. If staffing is where the money goes, the Review reads the Start of care → Shifts hand-off first: agreed hours against staffed hours by client, where open shifts go, what overtime covers, and how many inquiries were declined for lack of a caregiver match. Every leak gets a dollar figure and the fix list is ordered by it, so if staffing costs the most, it comes first and its cost is counted, not assumed.
How fast does a family inquiry need an answer?
There is no single standard number. The Review measures the agency’s own: the minutes from a call in the phone log to the first reply in the inquiry list, by hour and weekday, and what happened to the families on each side of that gap.
Client information is protected. What does the agency hand over?
Hours, rates, dates and payer types. The Review does not need care notes, diagnoses or anything clinical. Access is read-only, client names can be replaced with IDs before anything is exported, and the minimum needed is requested in writing up front. Every export is handled as health information, and nothing on this site asks for a client’s health details. Whether HIPAA applies to a given agency turns largely on whether it sends standard transactions, such as claims, electronically, and that question belongs to the agency’s own counsel.
We’re a franchise territory, and the franchisor already gives us benchmarks. Does this add anything?
Franchisor benchmarks compare one territory with the system’s averages. The Review counts this territory’s own hand-offs from its own phone log, schedule, payroll and invoices, and dates every finding. It works inside whatever platform the franchisor requires and changes none of it. If the franchise agreement restricts sharing system data, that gets checked before any access. Start with the 20-minute call, before any payment; if the $4,500 fee is not justified by what the territory can show, the call is where that gets said.
Related reading
Nearby trades
In depth
The long version, for an owner who wants the detail.
The outside numbers, each with its source
About 760,500 openings a year for home health and personal care aides are projected, on average, through 2035, many of them to replace workers who move to other occupations or leave the labor force; aides may work evening and weekend hours, depending on their clients’ needs.
Sources
Occupational Outlook Handbook: Home Health and Personal Care Aides · U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026
The next step
Tell us what isn’t getting followed up. We’ll tell you if we can help.
- Send the form beside this. A person reads it, not a bot or a ticket queue. We call you back the same business day.
- 20-minute call: fit, not yet, or not us.
- If it fits: the Revenue Review, $4,500 flat, two weeks.
+1 (202) 600-6027Mon–Fri, 9 a.m.–6 p.m. ET · A real person answers or calls you back the same business day.