Aged Care Rostering Software Australia: Built for the New Aged Care Act

It’s 6.30am at a 90-bed residential aged care home and two registered nurses have called in sick within the last hour. The care home is now one absence away from breaching the 24/7 RN requirement, the rostered care minutes for the day have dropped well below the 215-minute target and the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission is carrying out a site audit next week.

Under the new Aged Care Act 2024, which has been in force since 1 November 2025, documentation is no longer something you can just put together for an audit. The regulator expects to see it every shift, every day. This is where modern aged care rostering software is invaluable.

What you’ll learn in this article:

How rostering software helps you meet the 215-minute care minutes target every shift
How to evidence the 24/7 RN requirement to ACQSC
Automating SCHADS Award and Aged Care Award rostering
Creating audit-ready trails for the Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards
Finding casual staff more quickly in a market with a workforce shortage.

The New Regulatory Reality: Why Australian providers Can’t Roster Like It’s 2024

The Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards have introduced a more prescriptive, rights-based framework. The ACQSC assesses the standards against graded performance ratings rather than just determining whether an aged care home is compliant or non-compliant.

The previous regime tolerated evidence provided during a particular point in time during an audit, but now you need to prove that you’re continuously meeting workforce, clinical and quality obligations.

The Department of Health and Aged Care has been explicit that providers must demonstrate compliance with the 24/7 RN and care minutes responsibilities through their workforce systems.

Spreadsheets and paper rosters don’t generate that evidence, so providers we speak with are concluding that aged care rostering software is essential to ensure they stay licensed.

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Two compliance numbers now govern residential aged care rostering in Australia.

The first is the care minutes target, which has been operating since October 2024. Every residential aged care home needs to deliver an average of 215 care minutes per resident per day, of which at least 44 must be delivered by a Registered Nurse.

Your home's exact target shifts depending on the care needs of your residents, but for most providers, the 215 and 44-minute marks are the minimum to hit.

The second compliance number is the 24/7 RN requirement, in force since 1 July 2023. A Registered Nurse must be on site and on duty in every residential aged care home, every minute of every day. Exemptions for some small rural and remote homes exist but are narrow.

These targets are reported quarterly to the Department of Health and Aged Care, published via My Aged Care star ratings, and assessed by ACQSC. Missing them without being able to evidence how and why is a major compliance issue.

Good aged care scheduling software helps enormously. It should:

Calculate care minutes by role as you build the roster, compare them against your home's required target and flag any shortfall before you publish
Continuously monitor 24/7 RN cover and timestamp the actual cover delivered for audit
Re-cost the roster when someone calls in sick, so you can see the impact on care minutes and RN cover before you start contacting casual staff
Store the evidence automatically, with every decision and replacement time-stamped, so quarterly reports and ACQSC audits are pulled from data you already have.

With Simplifi’s staff rostering and compliance modules care minutes compliance is built into the roster development.

SCHADS Award, Aged Care Award and Rostering Complexity

Residential employees are typically covered by the Aged Care Award 2010 (or an enterprise agreement built on top of it), while the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry (SCHADS) Award normally covers in-home and community employees. Nurses are often covered by the Nurses Award 2020, with enterprise agreements layered over the top.

This creates rostering complexity due to:

SCHADS introducing minimum engagement, broken-shift rules, travel-time entitlements between client visits and tight rules on changes to rostered hours, all of which must land in the roster before the shift is worked, not get corrected in payroll afterwards
The Aged Care Award driving overnight shifts, sleepovers, weekend and public holiday penalty rates and a clear divide between RN, EN and PCW classifications that needs to map cleanly onto the care minutes split
NES entitlements (the National Employment Standards) sitting underneath it all (minimum breaks, maximum hours and casual entitlements, all updated under the Fair Work Closing Loopholes reforms).

SCHADS award rostering in a spreadsheet is a recipe for unintentional underpayment. In an awards-aware platform, it’s a non-event. Simplifi’s Payroll Rules Engine and Awards interprets SCHADS, the Aged Care Award and your enterprise agreement on the fly, so the time data flowing into payroll is already compliant.

Managing Casual, Permanent and Agency Staff in a Market with a Workforce Shortage

AIHW data shows persistent vacancies in RN and care worker roles across most residential facilities, while Australia’s ageing population keeps lifting demand every year.

The Productivity Commission and successive aged care workforce strategies have concluded that providers will keep relying on a mix of permanent, casual and agency labour for the foreseeable future. That makes rostering less about filling out a fixed weekly template and more about juggling a workforce that changes daily, while still meeting your compliance minimums.

The table below reframes the casual/permanent challenge against the Australian operating reality:

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Challenge Under the New Standards	How Workforce Management Software Helps
Filling last-minute RN absences without dropping below 24/7 cover	Mobile notifications sent to qualified casuals with RN registration on file ( accept and assign in minutes)
Holding the skill mix that delivers 215 care minutes per resident per day, with 44 by a Registered Nurse	Automated matching of RN, EN and PCW hours against the day's case-mix target
Managing staff preferences and availability	Self-service availability via mobile, with provider-side controls on caps and conversion thresholds
Building a reliable casual pool	Track reliability, no-show rate and resident feedback so the most dependable casuals get called first
Award and NES compliance for casuals and agency	Built-in award interpretation, break and hours rules, and casual conversion flags applied at the point of rostering

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Simplifi’s casual staff management module is built for the type of workforce that involves high turnover, multiple awards and a compliance floor that doesn’t move.

Certification Tracking and Audit Trails for ACQSC

Workforce evidence is one of the areas the Strengthened Standards focus on the most.

ACQSC expects providers to demonstrate that every worker delivering regulated care is qualified, registered and screened for the role on the day they work it, not on the day they were hired.

That sounds obvious, but in practice, around 40% of aged care workers in Australia deliver direct care without a Certificate III, AHPRA registrations need currency checks, NDIS Worker Screening must be tracked for any provider also serving NDIS participants and mandatory training plus first aid and CPR expire on cycles that rarely line up with the audit.

Rostering software for aged care turns this into a controlled system:

Every staff profile carries qualifications, registrations and training records with expiry dates, with alerts sent well before expiry
The system blocks scheduling of any staff member into a role they aren’t qualified or screened for, including stopping an EN being assigned to an RN slot
Every roster change, credential check and override is time-stamped to a named user.

When the ACQSC audit lands, the reporting module produces the workforce evidence auditors look for: care minutes delivered against target, 24/7 RN cover by day, qualifications by shift, certification currency and a complete decision log. The audit becomes a conversation about your data, not a hunt for it.

Choosing Aged Care Rostering Software: An Australian Provider’s Checklist

Many generic workforce tools claim to handle aged care. The ones that actually do can address these questions without a custom build:

Does it understand the Australian aged care compliance stack (i.e. care minutes, 24/7 RN, Strengthened Standards, Aged Care Award, SCHADS Award, NES and NDIS Worker Screening where relevant)?
Is the care minutes calculation native, real-time and case-mix-aware, not a report after the fact?
Does it block non-compliant assignments (unqualified workers, expired AHPRA registration, lapsed NDIS screening and NES or award breaches)?
Does the awards engine interpret SCHADS and the Aged Care Award correctly, including penalty rates, broken shifts, sleepovers, public holiday rules and any layered enterprise agreement?
Does it integrate cleanly with your payroll system? Australian providers typically run KeyPay, MYOB, Xero, Employment Hero Payroll or Definitiv and Simplifi’s payroll integration connects directly to these without manual re-keying.
Can staff roster from their phone? Casual fill speed is the biggest lever on labour cost and care continuity.
Does it produce ACQSC-ready reporting out of the box? Audit evidence should be a click, not a project.
Is the vendor present in Australia so it can provide local support, a local product roadmap and a local understanding of Modern Awards?

Implementation Roadmap: Eight weeks, Done Properly

A well-scoped implementation process moves quickly. Most Australian providers can be live on a new platform in around eight weeks.

Weeks 1–2 — Discover

Audit current rostering processes, document where care minutes and 24/7 RN are being missed (or missed but undetected) and pull qualification and registration data into a single source.

Weeks 3–4 — Configure

Set up homes, units, classifications, award and enterprise agreement rules, care minutes targets adjusted for the relevant case mix and certification validity rules. Run a parallel roster on sample data to validate the awards engine against payroll.

Weeks 5–6 — Pilot

Roll out to one home (or one unit in a larger home), running live alongside the existing system for a fortnight. Capture feedback from care managers and staff. Tune the alerts so they’re useful, not noise.

Weeks 7–8 — Roll out

Sequence the rest of the network onto the platform with hands-on training for rostering users and mobile onboarding for staff.

Ongoing

Use the reporting module to monitor the KPIs below, and refine award rules as Fair Work decisions land.

Measuring success: KPIs that matter under the new standards

Under the old regime, KPIs were operational. Under the strengthened standards, they’re also regulatory, and they sit on the same dashboard.

Compliance with Strengthened Standards	Operational Efficiency	Quality and Continuity of Care	Financial Impact
Care minutes delivered vs 215 target (and 44 RN minutes), by day	Time to fill an open shift	Same-staff continuity score for residents	Labour cost as % of revenue
24/7 RN cover (% of minutes covered)	Hours per week building and adjusting rosters	Family satisfaction scores	Overtime cost trend
Certification and AHPRA currency rate	Late starts and no-shows	Resident incidents correlated with staffing variance	Casual and agency spend
ACQSC audit readiness (time to produce evidence)	Roster vs actual variance	Staff retention rate	Time saved in payroll reconciliation

Each of these is reportable out of the box in Simplifi.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does aged care rostering software help us meet the 215-minute care minutes target?

The software calculates care minutes in real time as the roster is built (broken down by RN, EN and PCW) against the home’s case-mix-adjusted target.

If RN minutes are short, you see it before the shift is published. When an employee calls in sick, the platform immediately shows the impact on care minutes so you can prioritise who you contact.

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Does the system support SCHADS Award and Aged Care Award interpretation?

Yes. Simplifi’s awards engine interprets both (including penalty rates, minimum engagement, broken shifts and travel time) and any enterprise agreement layered on top is configured during implementation. The time data going into payroll is already compliant.

Can it evidence the 24/7 RN requirement for ACQSC?

Yes. The platform monitors 24/7 RN cover continuously, flags gaps as they would arise and keeps a time-stamped record of actual RN presence on shift. ACQSC-ready reporting is produced on demand.

Can it prevent scheduling unqualified staff?

Yes. The system blocks any assignment where the staff member doesn't have the right qualification, registration or screening for the role (for example, an enrolled nurse rostered into a registered nurse shift, a nurse whose AHPRA registration has lapsed or anyone scheduled to work with NDIS participants without a current NDIS Worker Screening Check).

How does it handle last-minute shortages?

When an absence is logged, the system identifies qualified, available casuals and pushes the offer to their phones via the mobile app. The first qualified casual to accept is allocated. Gaps that took hours of phone calls close in minutes.

What happens during an ACQSC audit?

Audit evidence is produced from data the system already holds. A care manager can generate care minutes performance, 24/7 RN cover, qualification compliance and a full decision log in a few clicks.

From Compliance Burden to Compliance Confidence

The aged care providers pulling ahead in 2026 are the ones whose rostering system speaks the language of the regulator, every shift, every day.

Good aged care rostering software handles each of those obligations in the background, with audit-ready evidence on hand whenever ACQSC asks. It frees the care manager to focus on residents, not spreadsheets.

To see how Simplifi handles care minutes, 24/7 RN cover, SCHADS award rostering and ACQSC evidence against your own home’s setup, book a demonstration or get in touch to start the conversation.

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