How do I run SAH care management within the 10% cap without working for free?

• Every participant has a Care Partner — a named individual at the provider responsible for care plan oversight, goal review, service coordination and participant liaison.
• Care management is a discrete funded service category with its own allocation — not a general overhead to absorb.
• Care management funding is hard-capped at 10% of the participant's quarterly budget. This was clarified and tightened in the 2026 review — earlier interpretations allowed higher percentages; the current position is 10% and no more.
• Care-management activity must be documented and billable against the cap — phone calls, home visits, care-plan reviews, coordination with other services, and goal-review meetings all count.
• The Care Partner is also the accountable person for goal-based care planning and reablement-oriented decision-making (see the Reablement and Goals pillar).

Reference: Aged Care Act 2024 Chapter 4; Aged Care Rules 2025 Chapter 4 (care management provisions); Support at Home Program Manual — care management section; Department of Health care management guidance (2026 update).

• Treating care management time as an overhead, absorbed into general operating costs, instead of billing it against the 10% allocation. The provider ends up working for free while the funding sits unspent.
• Going over the 10% cap and then having to write it off at quarter-end. The cap is hard — there is no grace margin — and a provider that routinely overspends the cap is either under-pricing care management or overspending it.
• No audit trail of Care Partner activity. Phone calls and home visits live in someone's head, not in a system. When an assessor asks 'show me the care management time for this participant for the last quarter', the provider can't produce it.
• Care Partner assigned on paper but not in the system. The Care Partner exists in a signed service agreement, but the roster system doesn't know who it is, and care-management time isn't routed to them.
• Goal reviews skipped because the Care Partner is busy delivering services instead of coordinating them. The cap is designed to fund coordination time — not logging it means not doing it.
• Earlier 2025 guidance permitted care management at higher percentages; some providers still use 15% or combined percentages from the HCP-era. The current position is 10% flat.

• Named Care Partner assigned per participant from a configurable Care Partner register. The assignment is first-class data, not a text note — rosters, workflows, and alerts all route through it.
• Care-management time tracking with activity types (phone call, home visit, care-plan review, goal review, external coordination, case conference), duration, and participant attribution.
• Real-time 10% cap enforcement per participant per quarter. The cap is calculated from the participant's quarterly budget and updates if the classification level changes. When the cap is approaching, the Care Partner sees the warning before they schedule more time.
• Over-cap protection — time entries that would push the participant over the 10% cap are flagged for supervisor review before they're locked in. No silent overspend.
• Care Partner dashboard with overdue goal reviews, overdue care-plan reviews, outstanding action items, and participants approaching their budget thresholds.
• Quarterly cap utilisation report showing every Care Partner's time allocation across their caseload, so Operations can see whether the cap is being used, under-used, or systematically overrun.
• Care-management time flows through to the monthly participant statement as a line item, so participants can see what they're being charged for.

When an assessor asks for evidence on this obligation, here's what the platform produces on request — date-stamped, user-attributed, and exportable:

• Care Partner assignment history per participant — who, effective from, effective to, and the reason for any change.
• Time entries logged by the Care Partner with date, activity type, duration, participant, and free-text narrative.
• Cap utilisation report per participant per quarter — allocated care-management budget, time entries charged, percentage of cap used, and remaining headroom.
• Goal review log linked to the care plan, showing scheduled date, actual date, outcome, and the Care Partner who completed it.
• Care plan review history with version comparison and the Care Partner who signed off each version.
• Over-cap flags and supervisor review records for any time entry that would have pushed the participant over the 10% cap.