You deliver care today but get paid weeks later — after authorizations, claim submission, edits, and payer processing. The fix isn’t working harder; it’s shortening each step, forecasting the gap, and keeping a cash buffer so a slow payer never becomes a missed payroll.
Home care revenue moves through a long pipeline: authorization, service delivery, documentation, claim submission, payer adjudication, and finally payment. Each handoff adds days. Medicaid, managed-care organizations (MCOs), and waiver programs each pay on their own clock, and a single missing field can send a claim back to the start.
The result is structural: your largest recurring cost — payroll — is due weekly or biweekly, while the revenue that funds it lands 2–6 weeks after the visit. That timing mismatch, not profitability, is what sinks most growing agencies.
Build a rolling 13-week cash forecast: expected collections by payer against payroll and fixed costs, week by week. It turns “are we okay?” into a number you can see coming.
Then size a cash reserve to the gap — many agencies target enough operating cash to cover the average days between visit and payment (often 4–8 weeks of payroll). A line of credit can bridge a spike, but a buffer you own beats interest you pay.
NavSuccess does this for home care & healthcare agencies — see Cash-flow & forecasting.
Enough to cover the typical lag between delivering care and getting paid — often 4–8 weeks of payroll plus fixed costs. The right number comes from your own days-to-payment by payer.
It’s a useful shock absorber for a temporary spike, but it shouldn’t fund a permanent, predictable gap. If you draw on it every month, the real fix is faster billing and a bigger buffer.
Getting claims paid the first time. Every denial resets the payment clock and adds weeks — clean, timely claims do more for cash than any financing.
Book a free 30-minute consultation. We’ll look at where your books and compliance stand and show you exactly what we’d take off your plate.