Matching care delivery to demand helped Liaise save £1m.

"🔮 Trying to predict everything is impossible. Focus on what you can control."

Liaise is a learning disability provider with 46 homes across Basingstoke, Worthing, London, Kent, and East Anglia. They currently support 200 vulnerable adults and employ 1,100 staff.

In December 2023, they began rolling out Sona’s HR, Scheduling, and Engagement products. By March 2024, they were already seeing the benefits.

With Sona, Liaise set out to future-proof their processes ahead of planned growth and to gain the operational visibility needed to navigate external challenges.

This time last year when we were looking at predictions for national living wage increases, nobody predicted it was going to be as high as it was and absolutely nobody saw a national insurance hike coming.

I think we are comfortable that we will be able to weather the storm. [...] Looking at our forecasts, it's gonna be a tough year, but I am very confident we will weather it.

There will always be things in this sector that you can't control. And it's about having the tools to be able to control what you can as much as possible. 

Claire Kennedy, CPO

Chief People Officer and Sona project lead, Claire Kennedy, believes they’ve succeeded on all fronts and are now firmly on track to achieve their growth goals.

Within the next 12 to 18 months, we will probably reach over 1500 staff. The ambition is that within three to five years, we'll probably be around 2000 staff.

Claire Kennedy, CPO

In terms of benefits, Liaise has seen:

• £1m (2% of total revenue) saved in the past financial year thanks to matching care delivery to commissioned hours
• 40h per week saved in HR admin time
• Visibility and support for their sponsored worker programme, ensuring new teams were easily onboarded and no visa hour limitations were breached
• Next-day access to earned wages for staff thanks to a high-quality integration between Sona and Wagestream

Solving the commissioned vs. delivered hours growth blocker

One of the key areas where the Liaise team identified potential for significant savings was in matching commissioned hours to delivered hours. Traditionally, supported living providers operate complex services spread across large areas, and revenue leakage is common due to limited tools for gaining real visibility into care delivery.

With Sona’s unique People We Support (PWS) dashboard — which tracks care hours delivered against individual commissions — Liaise was able to:

• Record, time-stamp, and attribute every hour of care delivered to a specific PWS, including hours delivered by agency
• Track care delivery in real-time and compare it to commissioned hours at any time in order to ensure teams are on track and within budget

We've done a massive project here at Liaise called the Target Operating Model. And that's to make sure that each of the homes are staffing to our commissioned hours - which was really hard to monitor before and we didn't have any real-time data.

We now have a bespoke report from Sona that allows us to monitor that. I run that every week and it shows our total staffing hours coming through versus our commissioned hours. Then we have a meeting with our regional managers to look at the variance across each site. That helps highlight any issues in recruitment, too. Are they understaffed? Do we need to put more people in there? Are they using too much management hours on the floor? It gives us really good visibility. 

Rebecca Moore, HR Business Partner

This approach has helped Liaise protect against clawbacks and reduce downbanding risks. They can also now clearly identify where over-delivery is necessary and provide evidence to support re-assessment requests for the people they support.

 In this financial year, we've saved £1m through the visibility that Sona has given us in terms of our workforce management.

Claire Kennedy, CPO

From 20% in agency costs to less than 5% - a complex picture

Liaise’s leadership team was also motivated to reduce agency costs and improve consistency of care by launching a major recruitment drive and rolling out Sona’s Openshift Marketplace. When Sona was introduced, Liaise had managed to reduce agency costs from 20% to 9%, which was further lowered to under 5% with the Sona roll-out.

When picking up overtime, it [Openshift Marketplace] makes it fair for everybody. It is all visible on the app and people can pick up extra shifts. It definitely decreased agency usage for us to make all of that visible where it wasn't before. 

Rebecca Moore, HR Business Partner

Sponsored care professionals also played a big role in reducing agency spend, helping to fill critical workforce gaps in social care over recent years. With over 200 staff members on skilled worker visas, the Liaise team recognised the importance of providing comprehensive support and onboarding to ensure long-term success.

In addition, having clear visibility into hours worked was essential for maintaining compliance with Home Office regulations.

 Sona has helped our visibility of skilled workers, whereby we have tabs within Sona where we can identify who is on a skilled worker visa to make sure that they are meeting their hours, which ensures we meet home office obligations.

Equally, we have a number of people on visas that are restricted to 20 hours a week, and we are able to see actively on the rotas if they are then going over that 20 hours to make sure that we are complying with the home office regulations. And it's, it's very easy to see and we monitor that on a weekly basis.

Claire Kennedy, CPO

Making it easy for permanent team members to pick up extra shifts through the Openshift Marketplace meant that Liaise could reserve agency use for when it was truly necessary — ensuring the people they support were cared for by familiar, trusted faces whenever possible.

Saving 40h per week in HR admin, thanks to an integrated Scheduling & HR solution

Managing a large workforce — particularly one that includes sponsored care professionals — brings significant administrative demands. As a Senior HR Business Partner, Rebecca Moore has seen her role transform dramatically since Liaise went digital.

 Sona has changed my role here massively. When I first started, a lot of our rotas and processes were on paper. We were using lots of different systems that hadn't really been set up well which was giving us a lot of data but very little actual insight. 

 One tab in Sona HR allow us to identify who our sponsored workers are. So, when we're creating a report and looking at compliance, it's just so much easier. DBSs, passports, visas - having the data in Sona helps us monitor when those are coming out of date, so we make sure that we're on top of compliance.

Rebecca Moore, Senior HR Business Partner 

A smooth integration process with Sona and Wagestream

After successfully rolling out both Sona and Wagestream at her previous company and seeing the impact firsthand, Claire Kennedy knew she wanted to bring the same benefits to Liaise.

We are currently API linking Wagestream into the backend of Sona.

The goal is for people's hours to be uploaded every day into Wagestream automatically, once managers clear their exception reporting. This ensures our workforce has real-time access to their salary - an important benefit for them.

Claire Kennedy, CPO

Thanks to the flexibility of modern solutions and their open API structures, Claire found the integration process quick and straightforward. Her advice to other providers considering the integration is to focus on training teams to maximise the benefits from day one.

Once Sona and Wagestream tested it and all of the technical people in the background did their work, it's been quite quick. I think the key thing again is making sure that managers are trained properly, so frontline teams can see the benefits right away.

Claire Kennedy, CPO

Overall, Claire had one message for other Social Care providers: 

For those still relying on paper-based T&A systems and spreadsheets, the administrative burden is considerable. It places a strain on both individuals and managers. The process involves transferring data into an Excel spreadsheet, which then needs to be sent to payroll for analysis, which then might have potential queries before it can be processed. This method is prone to errors, time-consuming, and costly. Every moment a manager spends on these administrative tasks is time taken away from providing care. Digitalisation is essential; we can no longer afford to operate with outdated paper systems.

The enhanced visibility, efficiency, and time savings offered by digital solutions are substantial.

Claire Kennedy, CPO

Sona from the frontline perspective

As a Service Manager, Renee's days are full—audits, action plans, liaising with stakeholders, supporting her team, and making sure the people in her service receive the best possible care.

Before Sona, managing rotas, monitoring attendance, and keeping track of sickness trends meant juggling multiple systems and time-consuming manual work. Now, with everything in one place, she can spend more time where it counts: on the floor with her team.

One of her favourite features is how simple it is to plan ahead and give staff visibility over their schedules.

Now I can plan six months of rotas in advance. It means staff can see what days they’re working and plan their lives—it’s perfect.

Renee, Service Manager

She also appreciates how easy it is to get the data she needs to support her team and manage performance.

We can spot trends around sickness and lateness early and address them. It’s helped us improve oversight and support staff wellbeing.

Renee, Service Manager

For Tosin, a Senior Support Worker, Sona has been a game changer in reducing admin, saving time, and helping him deliver the high standards his service strives for every day.

As a Team Leader, Ramon is responsible for planning daily activities, coordinating appointments, and ensuring everything runs smoothly for both the team and the people they support.

Before switching to Sona, managing these responsibilities involved juggling multiple apps and paper-based processes. Booking annual leave, filling shifts, or just finding out who was working took up valuable time—and often meant long hours chasing updates manually.

Now, everything is streamlined in one place.

Before, we used to spend hours just trying to cover a shift. Now, we post it in Sona and someone picks it up. We’ve gone from spending four hours on the phone to going out for a bike ride or bowling instead.

Ramon, Team Lead

Ramon and his team are now able to plan further ahead, coordinate more effectively, and spend more quality time with the people they support.

It’s had a big impact. The people we support can ask who’s working with them next week, and we can actually give them an answer. That used to be hard.

Ramon, Team Lead

Thanks to Sona, Ramon’s team has more time to focus on what really matters—enhancing quality of life through meaningful activities, not admin.