How ShiftCare’s partnership with Employment Hero transforms payroll for care providers

About ShiftCare

ShiftCare is Australia’s leading NDIS rostering and care management platform, serving more than 7,000 businesses and over 35,000 users across the disability, aged care and community health sectors. Built to handle the complex scheduling and compliance demands of care providers, ShiftCare sits at the intersection of workforce management and client care and has expanded into the US and UK alongside its Australian growth.

ShiftCare is a referral partner of Employment Hero, part of Employment Hero’s broader partner network. The partner network connects complementary software providers, accountants and business services with Employment Hero’s HR and payroll platform which enables partners to refer clients, earn commissions and build integrations that create real value for shared customers. For ShiftCare, the partnership began as a referral arrangement and grew into something much deeper: a direct product integration, a shared go-to-market strategy and a genuine two-way relationship built on aligned markets and mutual trust.

The challenge

Running payroll in the NDIS and aged care sector isn’t straightforward. Staff work across multiple shifts, clients and locations. Award interpretation is complex and non-negotiable. The cost of getting it wrong – back-pays, compliance breaches, manual corrections – can be significant.

For years, care providers using ShiftCare for rostering still had to bridge a gap between their shift data and their payroll system. That meant manual exports, re-entry of timesheet data and payroll runs that stretched across days rather than hours. For growing organisations, the problem compounds fast.

Customers managing 50, 100, or 200+ staff on generic payroll platforms were hitting hard limits – technically and operationally. Something had to change.

The solution

ShiftCare and Employment Hero built a direct product integration designed to eliminate the gap between rostering and payroll entirely.

Within ShiftCare, managers create and approve shifts and timesheets. Approved hours are then sent directly to Employment Hero via integration, where pay groups are mapped to the correct work types, pay rates and award conditions. Once configured, timesheets can be transferred with a single click, and Employment Hero automatically handles award interpretation, pay calculations, compliance and payroll processing.

“Payroll for a large organisation can go from two days to two hours once you’ve got it set up properly with Employment Hero.” — Paul Slater, Product Experience & Operations Manager, ShiftCare

The result is a seamless, end-to-end workflow with no manual re-entry and no risk of data dropping between systems. ShiftCare’s team considers it the strongest integration in their entire platform ecosystem.

“We’ve built a brand new integration with Employment Hero and it is the best integration that we have in ShiftCare. Employment Hero is best in class. It does the award interpretation, it gets the result for the customer that they need.” — Paul Slater

What partnership with Employment Hero actually looks like

For businesses considering Employment Hero’s partner network, ShiftCare’s experience is a useful blueprint. The referral partner program gives partners a structured, low-friction way to refer clients and earn commission. However, the ShiftCare relationship demonstrates what’s possible when a partnership goes further.

The partner portal makes referrals simple. ShiftCare team members log leads directly, track their progress and receive automated commission payments – no manual invoicing, no chasing accounts teams.

Dedicated partnership support is what ShiftCare values most. Rather than logging support tickets or calling a helpline, ShiftCare’s team has a direct Slack channel with Employment Hero’s partner and implementations teams – meaning questions get answered quickly and blockers get removed fast.

“It makes a difference to have someone that you can contact instead of going through call centres and support tickets. Having that collaborative approach is very important, it’s not something I get from other partners.” — Paul Slater

Joint go-to-market activity has deepened the partnership further. ShiftCare and Employment Hero run joint webinars, with Employment Hero attending and presenting at ShiftCare’s annual customer events across Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney. The teams have done sales training together and built shared understanding of each other’s products, so every customer-facing conversation reinforces the value of both platforms.

The ROI

Since integrating with Employment Hero, ShiftCare has seen measurable improvements across its business. From faster payroll outcomes for customers to a stronger, more scalable partner revenue stream, the results speak to what’s possible when two platforms are genuinely built to work together.

• Reduced payroll processing time by up to 96% from two days to two hours for large organisations
• 600+ care providers now running ShiftCare and Employment Hero together, reflecting strong customer adoption of the combined solution
• Automated partner commissions, eliminating manual administration and accelerating payments
• One of ShiftCare’s highest-performing referral partnerships, generating a consistent stream of inbound opportunities
• Year-on-year growth driven through joint webinars, events and go-to-market initiatives
• Scalable payroll and workforce management ecosystem supporting hundreds of shared customers

“What we’ve noticed is that our happiest ShiftCare customers are the ones with the Employment Hero integration. That in itself speaks to the benefit of the integration with Employment Hero.” – Matthew Armstrong, Partnerships Manager

Why it matters

For care providers, the combination of ShiftCare and Employment Hero builds the operational foundation to scale with confidence. Businesses that get the integration in place early avoid the growing pains that come from managing complex, shift-based payroll manually as headcount increases.

“It’s an absolute no-brainer from a business perspective to implement Employment Hero. The risk reduction, the time savings, the stress reduction, the costs of having to back-pay staff if you didn’t do it right the first time.” — Paul Slater

For the businesses that build it, a partnership with Employment Hero creates compounding value: better outcomes for shared customers, a reliable referral revenue stream and a direct line to a team that’s genuinely invested in making it work.

“I think it’s a good example of two companies working really well together and the numbers reflect that.” — Matthew Armstrong