Meet the Client
Caring Connections is a northwest-based charity, delivering person-centred home care and reablement services across Knowsley, Wigan, Warrington, Ellesmere Port, and Wirral. Registered with the CQC, alongside its core home care and reablement work, the charity has developed a portfolio of services that respond to some of the toughest challenges families face today: fully funded bereavement counselling, targeted community projects, and partnerships that bring research and innovation directly into frontline care.
That commitment to doing more has fuelled rapid growth, expanding both its geographic reach and the scale of its services to meet rising community needs. In the space of just five years, Caring Connections has increased its turnover tenfold — clear evidence of both rising demand and the trust communities place in its services. Through it all, the guiding ethos has remained the same: “we care for our carers so they can care for others.” Every surplus is reinvested into staff wellbeing and into the often-deprived communities it serves, ensuring growth is never just about numbers, but about lasting social value.
The Challenge
Rapid growth brings a range of challenges, including having scalable systems and processes and additional demands on working capital to support growth.
At the same time, Caring Connections has faced the same financial headwinds affecting the wider social care sector — rising operational costs, particularly staffing, alongside increasing demand for services without a matching uplift in sustainable funding. These pressures are compounded by policy-driven cost increases such as higher employer National Insurance contributions, which further squeeze already tight budgets.
How Adding Value Helped
The increase is the size of the staff team meant our payroll team had to be on the front foot. We implemented BrightPay as the payroll system, alongside smooth processes for capturing complex individual working hours across multiple sites and reports to help managers review and approve hours. The implementation also included an employee portal to allow all staff to view their payslips.
We’ve undertaken insightful work around budgeting and forecasting to help Caring Connections achieve its financial goals. We provide monthly cash flow projections and management accounts that track performance against the agreed annual budget, and have regular meetings to support financial decision-making and manage the financial position. This includes providing board papers to the charity’s trustees.
Integrating the Care Management System with the Finance system has been key to ensuring accurate financial reporting and the effective management of debtors.
Crossing the audit threshold required Adding Value to add another detailed layer of financial reporting into the mix too.
To support the working capital needs, Adding Value introduced the charity to two social investment companies, and successfully supported them to obtain blended finance (grants and loans). The additional working capital from this has given Caring Connections the assurance and confidence to continue on its growth journey.
Caring Connections has been working with Adding Value for over three years now, and the difference they’ve made has been incredible. When we first came to them, we were really struggling to find an accountancy organisation that understood not just our finances, but also who we are and the sector we work in. As a social care charity with lots of contracts across the Northwest, things can get very complex with different financial procedures and requirements for each authority.
From day one, the team at Adding Value have worked tirelessly alongside us. They’ve been patient, resilient, and always committed, even when the pressure from our side has been high. They’ve taken the time to really get to know us and how we work, and that has made all the difference. In the time we’ve worked together, our charity has grown from a £1 million turnover to a forecasted £6 million this year, and our staff team has grown from 60 to nearly 250.
Through it all, Adding Value have been there, managing our back-office finance processes and our complicated payroll cycles, keeping things running smoothly behind the scenes. It hasn’t always been easy, but they’ve stuck with us, and it’s worked. I honestly couldn’t recommend them highly enough — they’ve been a true partner in our journey.
Paul Growney, CEO, Caring Connections
