The hidden cost of spreadsheet rostering in care

The spreadsheet defence

When care providers explain why they are still rostering in spreadsheets, the most common answer is: "It works for us." And in a narrow sense, it does work. Shifts get assigned. Clients get serviced. The lights stay on.

But "works" is a low bar. The real question is what it is costing.

The visible costs

The visible costs of spreadsheet rostering are easy to see once you start looking.

Coordinator time. How many hours per week does your rostering coordinator spend maintaining the spreadsheet — entering data, checking conflicts, copying information from one place to another, fielding calls from carers who did not receive their schedule? For a coordinator managing a team of 30 or more, this is typically 10–15 hours per week. At enterprise salary, that is between $25,000 and $40,000 per year of a senior person's time spent on data entry.

Error correction. Spreadsheets have no conflict detection. A double-booking is only discovered when two carers arrive at the same location, or when a participant calls asking where their support worker is. The time spent resolving errors — identifying what went wrong, contacting carers, communicating with clients, arranging cover — is almost never measured. It should be.

Duplication. In most care organisations using spreadsheets, the same information lives in at least three places: the roster, the client record, and someone's email or WhatsApp history. Every time information needs to be updated, it needs to be updated in all three. The information is often inconsistent. Decisions get made on stale data.

The invisible costs

These are harder to see on a budget report, but they are real.

Compliance exposure. A spreadsheet has no audit trail. You cannot see who changed a carer assignment at 11pm on a Friday, or whether a qualification expiry was checked before a shift was assigned. If an incident is investigated, "the spreadsheet shows..." is not a compelling compliance record.

Carer churn. Carers who receive their schedule late, find errors in their jobs, or do not know about last-minute changes are unhappy carers. Disorganisation is one of the top reasons support workers leave. The cost of replacing a trained, experienced carer — recruitment, induction, the productivity gap while they come up to speed — is typically estimated at $5,000 to $10,000 per person. Spreadsheet-driven disorganisation is a direct contributor to that churn.

Coordinator burnout. Rostering is cognitively demanding work. Doing it in a spreadsheet — holding multiple constraints in your head, manually checking each assignment against a list of qualifications, managing changes through phone calls and text messages — is exhausting. Organisations that lose experienced coordinators often lose the institutional knowledge that was being held in those coordinators' heads rather than in a system.

Missed revenue. When a shift falls through because the coordinator could not quickly identify a replacement carer, or when a participant's plan hours are not fully delivered because the roster cannot accommodate them efficiently, that is direct revenue lost. NDIS providers in particular leave significant funding on the table through under-delivery caused by scheduling inefficiency.

The switching cost fallacy

The most common reason care organisations stay with spreadsheets longer than they should is the perceived switching cost. "We have our system. Everyone knows it. Training takes time. Things will break during the transition."

This is real. There is a transition cost. But it is typically a one-off cost paid once. The ongoing cost of the spreadsheet is paid every week, forever.

The organisations that make the switch consistently report that the transition takes two to four weeks for the core team, and that within 90 days they cannot imagine going back. The friction is at the front. The compounding benefit is permanent.

*Teiro replaces the spreadsheet with a scheduling board built for care — conflict detection, carer availability overlay, automatic notifications. [Book a demo](/demo).*