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What Your Future Residents Expect From Billing & Payment Experience.
73 Million Digitally Native Boomers Are Entering the Pipeline, but 75% of PCC Communities Are Not Ready.
We make getting paid easier.
The PointClickCare operators who build digital billing and payments around how families actually want to pay will win the next decade of admissions and reduce operating costs in the process.
This is the research, the math, and the playbook.
The Wave Is Here, and These Are Not Your Current Residents.
11,200 Americans Turn 65 Every Day. They Are Not Going to Tolerate a Paper Invoice.
The volume is staggering: 11,200 Americans cross the 65-year threshold every single day, a pace that holds through 2027. By 2030, all 73 million Baby Boomers will be 65 or older. The 80-and-over population, the segment most likely to need assisted living, memory care, and skilled nursing, grows 28% by 2030. Senior housing occupancy has hit 89.1% nationally after 18 consecutive quarters of growth, and the industry needs an estimated 806,000 new units by 2030 just to keep pace with demand.
Those are the numbers. Here is why they matter for your billing and payment operation specifically: the people filling those units are fundamentally different from the residents you serve today.
11,200 Americans turn 65 every single day. Every one of them managed money on a smartphone before they ever considered senior living.
Your next resident paid their mortgage from an app, split dinner on Venmo, and managed a portfolio on a tablet for 20 years before they ever considered senior living. They are not an outlier. Among adults aged 65 to 73, 91% own smartphones. That is not a niche tech-savvy slice. It is nearly everyone walking through your doors. 73% say technology is most important for managing their money, ranking it above health monitoring and social connection. 68% already use digital wallets. 82% prefer digital payments over paper. The average Baby Boomer owns seven connected devices. Mobile banking usage among adults 65+ grew 150% between 2019 and 2023.
This generation scheduled automatic transfers from banking apps, tracked investment portfolios on tablets, and managed every recurring bill digitally. They did not do these things occasionally. Digital financial management has been their default mode for two decades. A paper invoice arriving in the mail is not neutral to this population. It is a signal that your facility operates behind the curve, delivered at the exact moment a family is making a trust decision about care.
Now consider their adult children, the ones touring your facilities, signing admission agreements, and managing the bills. 62% of adults pay bills through fintech apps. Millennial and Gen X adult children carry near-100% digital expectations. They manage their own finances, their children's activities, and their households from their phones. They will expect to manage their parent's care bills the same way.
Your Current Residents Tolerate Paper. The Next Wave Will Not.
A text message has a 98% open rate. A piece of direct mail has a 20% open rate. That is the difference between a billing communication seen in minutes and one discarded unopened four out of five times. 55% of adults over 50 say they would consider changing providers if digital communication options were unavailable.
Your current residents tolerate paper billing because they have never expected anything else. The incoming wave will not tolerate it because they have always had something better. What works today will actively work against you tomorrow.
*Go deeper: "The Senior Living Demand Wave: What the Numbers Say About 2025-2030" | "Your New Residents Are More Digital Than You Think"*
Section 2:
The Person Paying Your Bill Is Probably Not Your Resident.
The Person Paying Your Bill Is Probably Not Your Resident.
63 Million Caregivers Manage the Money. Their Expectations Are Even Higher.
Behind nearly every resident stands a family, often geographically scattered, emotionally stretched, and financially entangled with a billing and payment process that was never designed for them. And their expectations for how that process should work are not just high. They are higher than the residents' own expectations, because these are Millennials and Gen Xers who have never known anything but digital.
92% of caregivers handle finances for their loved ones in care. That is not an occasional check-in. It is active, ongoing financial management layered on top of their own lives, jobs, and families. There are now 63 million Americans serving as caregivers, a nearly 50% increase since 2015. Among them, 10 million are Millennials who have never written a rent check, let alone navigated a paper-based senior living billing process. 29% are sandwich generation caregivers simultaneously managing obligations to children and aging parents.
63 million Americans are now caregivers. 92% manage finances for their loved ones. 10 million are Millennials who have never written a check.
The Scene That Plays Out in Your Business Office Every Week
A daughter in Seattle and a son in Chicago are splitting the cost of their mother's assisted living care. The invoice arrives on paper, mailed to the daughter. She photographs it, texts it to her brother, and asks who can cover what this month. He Venmos her his share. She pays the full amount on her credit card to avoid a late fee, then spends the next week chasing reimbursement through a shared Google Sheet.
Your system sees one payment, from one payer, on time. Everything looks clean. But behind that single transaction is a fragile coordination process your operations never see and cannot support. That family is not unusual. It is the new normal.
When Billing Confusion Costs You Revenue You Already Earned
37% of caregivers report missing payments due to billing confusion, not inability to pay. They had the money. They intended to pay. The process defeated them. 70% spend two or more hours per month resolving billing errors. 80% carry out-of-pocket expenses averaging $7,242 per year related to caregiving.
Walk through the math on a 120-bed assisted living community. 90% occupancy means 108 active residents. If 30% of those accounts involve families splitting costs across two or more members, that is 30+ accounts where your billing office is managing multiple payers, each generating additional calls, reconciliation questions, and payment-timing confusion. At two extra billing interactions per split-pay account per month, that is 720 additional billing touchpoints per year that your system was never built to handle.
This is where multi-guarantor billing stops being a feature and becomes a necessity. When multiple family members share financial responsibility, each person needs their own bill, their own payment method, and their own communication preference. Treating a family as a single billing entity ignores the reality of how modern families actually manage care.
37% miss payments due to confusion. 70% spend 2+ hours monthly on billing errors. 720 extra touchpoints per year in a 120-bed community.
*Go deeper: "The Person Paying Your Bill Is Not Your Resident"*
Section 3:
The 66-Point Gap.
The 66-Point Gap
91% of Families Are Digitally Capable. 75% of Communities Still Rely on Paper Checks.
Here is the uncomfortable math. 91% of the families paying your invoices bank on their phones, pay their mortgage from an app, and split a dinner tab with a two-second tap. Meanwhile, 75% of senior living communities still rely on paper checks as the primary payment method.
That is a 66-point gap between what your payers can do and what your operation allows them to do. And it does not close on its own. Every month, the share of your payer base that tolerates paper shrinks. Every month, the expectation for digital self-service grows. The gap widens.
91% of families can pay digitally. Only 25% of communities let them. That is a 66-point gap, and it widens every month.
The Infrastructure Deficit Runs Deeper Than Paper Checks
The paper-check number is not an outlier. It sits inside a broader infrastructure pattern. Only 35% of communities offer any kind of payment portal. Of those, only 18% have full integration with their EHR, meaning no manual data entry, no re-keying, and no reconciliation spreadsheets. Only 16% have a modern financial management system. Another 16% manage their entire financial operation through Excel. Only 9% use any form of AI or automation in their revenue cycle.
42% of finance staff time in senior living is consumed by manual billing and payment processing. Not analysis. Not forecasting. Processing: keying in check amounts, matching payments to accounts, chasing misapplied funds. Nearly half of your billing team's capacity goes to work that most industries automated a decade ago.
The Last Generation That Will Write You a Check
63% of Americans 65+ wrote a check in the last month. Among adults 18 to 24, that figure is 4%. The generation currently writing checks to your community is the last generation that will. The Millennials and older Gen Z entering caregiving roles do not use checks. Many do not own a checkbook. Some have never written one.
The demographic data is clear. The expectation gap is measurable. And the infrastructure deficit is quantifiable. The question is no longer whether your billing and payment process needs to change. The question is what happens when it does.
The answer, and this is where the story turns, is that a single infrastructure decision delivers three outcomes simultaneously.
Go deeper: "75% of Senior Living Communities Still Rely on Paper Checks. Here Is What That Actually Costs."
Section 4:
One Decision, Three Outcomes
One Decision. Three Outcomes That Compound
What Happens When You Close the Gap Between Paper-Based Billing and a Fully Integrated Digital Platform Inside PCC.
Most operators evaluate billing and payment modernization through one lens: will it save us money? That framing undervalues the decision by two-thirds.
When a senior living community closes the gap between paper-based billing and a fully integrated digital billing and payment platform inside PointClickCare, three things happen concurrently. Not sequentially. Not "maybe if it goes well." Concurrently, from the same implementation, starting from the same decision.
Outcome 1
Families get the billing and payment experience they already expect. Residents and their adult children interact with payments the way they interact with every other financial obligation in their lives, digitally, on their own schedule, from their own devices, with each family member managing their own portion.
Outcome 2
Your operating costs drop measurably. Processing time falls 96%. Staff hours shift from manual transaction handling to strategic financial management. Revenue leakage from manual errors shrinks. Cash flow accelerates from weeks to next-day. And card acceptance costs the facility nothing.
Outcome 3
You gain a competitive advantage that paper-based competitors literally cannot match. 67% of families factor the billing and payment experience into their facility selection. Your admissions team gets a differentiator that shows up in tours, satisfaction scores, referral rates, and retention.
These are not three separate projects. They are three faces of one infrastructure decision. The sections that follow walk through each outcome with the specifics.
SECTION 5: Outcome 1
Families Get the Experience They Expect
Families Get the Experience They Already Expect.
What Modern Billing & Payments Actually Look Like Inside PointClickCare.
Most senior living operators believe they have a billing and payment system. They have PointClickCare. They have a merchant processor. They have a staff member who spends two days each month reconciling the two. That is not a system. It is a workaround held together by manual effort and institutional memory.
Here is what the billing and payment experience looks like when the infrastructure actually matches what families expect.
Native PCC Integration That Deserves the Word
Integration is the most overused term in senior living software. A vendor that imports a CSV from PCC and calls it "integrated" is using the word loosely. True native integration means bidirectional data sync: resident demographics, payer responsibility, charge details, and payment history flow from PCC into the billing and payment platform automatically. Confirmed payments post back to PCC ledgers without anyone touching a keyboard. Zero double entry. No batch uploads. No end-of-day reconciliation spreadsheets.
A simple test: if anyone on your team exports a file from PCC, reformats it, and uploads it to another system at any point during the billing cycle, you do not have integration. You have a manual bridge disguised as a technical connection.
If anyone on your team exports a file from PCC and uploads it somewhere else during the billing cycle, you do not have integration. You have a manual bridge.
Multi-Guarantor Billing: One Resident Rarely Means One Payer
A resident in assisted living. Her son in Dallas pays 60%. Her daughter in Chicago covers 40%. The son prefers autopay. The daughter wants an emailed statement so she can review before paying by card.
In a single-guarantor system, one of two things happens. Either the facility sends one statement to one contact and hopes the family sorts it out, or the billing coordinator manually calculates each share and tracks two payment streams outside of PCC. Both approaches fail.
Multi-guarantor billing solves this at the system level. Each guarantor receives their own statement for their allocated share. Each stores their own payment method. Each selects their own communication preference: paper, email, or text. Charge allocation follows the responsibility split defined in PCC, and adjustments propagate automatically when charges change.
No-Login, No-App Payments That Eliminate Friction
The fastest way to delay a payment is to make it difficult. A statement delivers via text or email with a single embedded payment link. The guarantor taps the link, confirms the amount, and pays. No account creation. No password. No app download. One tap from notification to completed transaction.
This is not a convenience feature. It is a collections strategy. Families managing a parent's care are busy and stressed. Asking them to create a portal account and remember credentials is asking them to prioritize your payment over everything else competing for their attention. A no-login payment link meets them where they already are, in their text messages and email inbox, and removes every obstacle between intent and action.
Credit Card, Apple Pay, and Digital Wallet Acceptance
Families pay the way they pay for everything else in their lives. Credit cards, debit cards, ACH, Apple Pay, digital wallets. The breadth of options matters, but the delivery mechanism matters more. When the payment link arrives by text, a family member can complete payment in under 60 seconds without leaving the message thread.
Autopay: Set It Once, Never Think About It Again
For the monthly charges that are largely consistent in senior living, autopay is a natural fit. Every guarantor who enrolls is a payment that arrives without a reminder, a follow-up call, or a late notice. The billing cycle for that guarantor is complete before it begins. Top-performing communities achieve 40%+ autopay enrollment, meaning nearly half of monthly revenue arrives automatically.
Per-Guarantor Communication Preferences
The daughter wants a text. The son wants an email. The aunt still wants paper. Each person chooses, and each person receives their bill exactly how they asked for it. From the same system. Automatically.
Automated Reconciliation and Level-of-Care Triggers
When a guarantor pays, the payment posts to the correct PCC ledger entry immediately. No manual matching. No batch posting. No reconciliation spreadsheet. When a resident moves from assisted living to memory care, the daily rate changes. A fully integrated platform detects care level changes in PCC automatically. The next statement reflects the new rate without manual adjustment. Without automatic triggers, the facility provides a higher level of care and bills for a lower one, creating quiet, recurring revenue leakage that compounds every month it goes undetected.
Go deeper: "You Already Run PointClickCare. You Are Just Not Using It for Billing & Payments."
Section 6: Outcome 2
Your Operating Costs Drop
Your Operating Costs Drop.
Better for Families AND Cheaper to Operate. The Math Works in Both Directions.
Most business decisions in senior living are tradeoffs. Better care quality costs more. Higher staffing ratios strain budgets. Upgraded amenities require capital investment. You are constantly choosing between "better" and "cheaper."
Digital billing and payment transformation is the rare decision where both happen simultaneously. The improvements that make the experience easier for families are the same improvements that reduce cost, accelerate cash flow, and recover staff capacity. That is not marketing language. It is arithmetic, and the numbers are specific enough to run for your own community.
The $4.54 Gap: Cost Per Transaction
Start with a single billing transaction: one statement sent, one payment collected, one ledger entry posted.
In a manual workflow, that transaction takes approximately 10 minutes of staff time. At a fully loaded billing staff cost of $47.58 per hour, those 10 minutes cost $7.93. In a digital workflow, the same transaction takes approximately 15 seconds and costs $3.39 fully loaded, including platform fees.
The difference is $4.54 per transaction, a 57% cost reduction and a 96% reduction in time.
An Easy Cost Comparison
Manual Process:
10 minutes / $7.93 per transaction
Digital Process:
15 seconds / $3.39 per transaction
Total Savings:
$4.54 per transaction / 96% less time
Community-Level Math: 150 Transactions, 25 Hours, One Billing Cycle
A 100-bed community with an average of 1.5 guarantors per resident processes 150 billing and payment transactions per month.
Manual: 150 transactions at 10 minutes each = 25 hours of staff time per cycle. That is more than three full workdays every month dedicated to generating, sending, collecting, posting, and reconciling payments.
Digital: 150 transactions at 15 seconds each = 40 minutes per cycle.
The difference is 24 hours and 20 minutes per month. At $4.54 savings per transaction, that is $681 per month, or $8,172 per year for a single community. For a 10-community portfolio, the math scales directly to $81,720 per year.
Card Acceptance That Costs You Nothing
Here is the cost objection that stops most billing and payment modernization conversations: "We cannot absorb credit card processing fees on $5,900 monthly charges."
You do not have to. Convenience fee pass-through shifts the processing cost to the payer as a disclosed, optional service fee. The payer sees the fee clearly before confirming and can choose ACH to avoid it.
69% of payers accept the convenience fee and pay with their preferred card without hesitation. On a $5,900 assisted living charge, that means the facility gains all the collection speed, family satisfaction, and cash flow benefits of card acceptance while absorbing none of the 2.5% to 3.5% processing cost. At scale across 100+ residents, that is $15,000 to $25,000 per year in processing fees the facility never touches.
Card acceptance is not a cost. It is a free accelerator for every other financial improvement on this page.
69% of families accept the convenience fee. Card processing costs the facility nothing. You gain all the speed and satisfaction benefits without absorbing the cost.
Cash Flow Acceleration: From Weeks to Next-Day
Paper billing operates on mail time. Statement prints, enters the postal system, arrives in 3 to 5 days, sits on a counter, gets opened, a check is written and mailed back. End to end: 2 to 3 weeks from statement generation to cleared funds.
Digital billing and payments compress this to hours. Statement delivers by text or email instantly. The guarantor pays the same day. Funds settle next business day.
For a community with $500,000 in monthly private-pay charges, a 16-day acceleration means $50,000 to $100,000 more in working capital at any given time, money that was previously trapped in mail transit and check clearing.
Paper: 2-3 weeks to cleared funds. Digital: next-day settlement. Working capital impact: $50K-$100K+ for a 100-bed community.
Revenue Leakage: The Money You Already Earned But Never Collected
Revenue leakage is the term for charges that should have been billed but were not: services delivered, care levels changed, ancillary items consumed, none of which made it onto an invoice. In manual environments, leakage on ancillary charges alone can reach 30%.
For a 100-bed community with $30,000 in monthly ancillary charges, a 30% leakage rate means $9,000 per month in unbilled services, or $108,000 per year. Communities that move to fully integrated billing and payments typically recover 15% to 20% of total ancillary revenue in the first year: $54,000 to $72,000 returned to the top line. Not new revenue. Revenue that was already earned and simply never collected.
Staff Capacity Recovery: Not a Headcount Cut. A Role Elevation.
42% of finance staff time goes to manual billing and payment processing. Automating these workflows does not eliminate positions. It returns nearly half of a team's capacity to work that was crowded out: resident trust account management, payer contract reviews, proactive family communication, financial reports the executive director has been requesting but nobody had bandwidth to produce.
A billing coordinator who spent 25 hours per month on payment processing now spends 40 minutes. The remaining hours go to work that manual processes crowded out for years.
42% of finance staff time consumed by manual billing and payment processing. Automation does not cut headcount. It gives your team back nearly half their week.
Go deeper: "75% of Senior Living Communities Still Rely on Paper Checks. Here Is What That Actually Costs."
Section 7: Outcome 3
The Competitive Edge Nobody is Using Yet
The Competitive Edge Nobody Is Using Yet.
Your Tours Show Families What Life Looks Like. Your Billing & Payments Show Them What It Feels Like.
Every senior living community knows how to give a good tour. You show the rooms. You highlight the dining program. You walk through the activity calendar. You introduce key staff. But almost nobody talks about billing and payments during the tour. That is a missed opportunity, because families are already making judgments about your facility based on how you handle the financial experience, whether you bring it up or not.
67% of Families Use the Billing & Payment Experience as a Decision Filter
67% of families say they would choose a facility that accepts card payments over one that does not, all else being equal. That is not a soft preference. That is two-thirds of your prospective families making a binary judgment based on how you handle payments.
67% of bill payers would choose a card-accepting facility over one that does not. That is not a preference. It is a decision filter.
Two communities sit three miles apart. Similar amenities. Similar staffing. Similar price. One accepts cards, offers Apple Pay, and provides a 24/7 payment portal. The other mails paper invoices and accepts checks. For two out of three families evaluating both, the billing and payment experience alone tilts the decision.
Satisfaction Is Not About the Price. It Is About the Experience of Paying It.
J.D. Power's 2024 assisted living and memory care study scored the industry at 855 out of 1,000. The largest single-category satisfaction gain: a 24-point improvement in "price paid for services." That category does not measure whether families think the price is fair. It measures how they experience the financial relationship.
Families did not decide $5,900 per month was a bargain. What changed was clarity, predictability, and ease of payment. The billing and payment experience improved. Satisfaction followed.
The Conversion Math That Makes Every Differentiator Count
Assisted living converts 6% to 10% of leads. At those margins, a 2-point improvement is transformative. A 100-unit community generating 400 leads per year at 7% conversion produces 28 move-ins. At 9%, that is 36. Eight additional move-ins at $5,900 per month equals $566,400 in annualized revenue.
Turnover Economics: The Cost of Losing Residents You Did Not Have to Lose
Assisted living median annual turnover is 46.8%. Unit turnover costs $1,000 to $5,000 per unit, covering vacancy loss, marketing spend, move-in coordination, and administrative processing. A 100-unit community absorbs $46,800 to $234,000 per year in turnover costs at that rate. Not every turn is preventable. But billing and payment friction is one of the few turnover drivers that operators can eliminate entirely through infrastructure. If improved clarity prevents even five additional departures, savings range from $5,000 to $25,000.
The Tour Conversation That Changes the Decision
Imagine your admissions counselor adding this to the financial overview:
"If multiple family members share financial responsibility, each person gets their own statement for their portion. Each chooses how they receive it: text, email, or mail. You can pay by credit card, Apple Pay, or set up autopay so the payment happens automatically each month. There is a portal where you can see every statement and payment anytime. You will never need to call us about a bill."
The family across the table exchanges a glance. They have just toured two other communities where the answer to "How does billing work?" was "We will mail you a statement." Your facility just became the frontrunner, not because of the room size or the menu, but because you solved one of the biggest anxieties families carry into the admissions process: how are we going to manage the money?
And families talk. The daughter who had a seamless experience tells her book club. The son who split costs with his sister without a single phone call mentions it to a coworker whose parents are aging. Positive billing and payment experiences become word-of-mouth referrals your marketing budget could never buy.
The Competitive Window Is Three to Five Years
The 806,000 new units projected by 2030 will not be built around paper billing. They will launch with digital payment portals and integrated financial workflows from day one. Today, modern billing and payments are a differentiator. By 2030, they will be table stakes. The operators who modernize now gain a temporary but meaningful advantage during the highest-growth period the industry has ever seen. The operators who wait will compete against new-build communities where digital billing and payments are simply assumed.
Go deeper: "How Smart PCC Customers Are Turning Billing & Payments Into a Competitive Advantage"
Section 8:
Where Does Your Community Stand?
Where Does Your Community Stand?
Industry Benchmarks by Segment, Facility Type, and Technology Adoption.
The benchmarks below represent current performance across the five primary PCC care settings. These are your peers. The value is not in the numbers themselves. It is in the gap between where your community operates and where the segment center sits.
1
Occupancy
Independent living leads at 90.2%. CCRCs hold at 89.2%. Assisted living at 87.7%. Memory care ranges from 85% to 90%. Skilled nursing sits at 83.3%. At these levels, every operational advantage matters, including the billing and payment experience that shapes satisfaction and referral likelihood.
2
Private-Pay Mix
Your private-pay percentage determines how much impact a digital billing and payment solution has. Independent living is 90%+ private pay. Memory care exceeds 80%. CCRCs run around 85%. Assisted living sits at 66%. Skilled nursing ranges from 23% to 34%. For every segment where private pay dominates, billing and payment modernization affects the vast majority of transactions with no intermediary, no claims processor, and no reimbursement schedule. The community controls the entire experience.
3
Monthly Pricing
Independent living averages $4,098/month. Assisted living averages $5,900. Memory care averages $8,749. When families pay $5,900 to $8,749 per month, they expect a billing and payment experience that matches the price point. A paper invoice with a return envelope does not match.
4
Technology Adoption
35% of communities offer a payment portal. 18% have full EHR integration. 80% of SNFs have adopted EHR, but assisted living lags at 48%. Only 9% use any AI or automation. The clinical record is digital. The care plan is digital. The billing statement is a PDF in an email or a paper invoice in a stamped envelope. The gap between clinical technology and billing and payment technology is where the opportunity sits.
5
Operating Margins
Independent living: 25-30%. Assisted living: 10-20%. Memory care: 12-18%. CCRCs: 15-25%. Skilled nursing: 1.8-2.1%, with 47-59% of SNFs operating at negative margins. At every margin level, dollars recovered through faster collections, fewer write-offs, and reduced administrative labor drop directly to the bottom line.
Go deeper: "2025 Senior Living Benchmarks by Facility Type"
Section 9:
Take the PCC Digital Billing & Payment Readiness Assessment
Take the PCC Digital Billing & Payment Readiness Assessment
See Where Your Facility Stands Against Industry Benchmarks in Five Minutes.
You have seen the industry data. You know the benchmarks. Now see where your specific facility stands.
The assessment evaluates your operation across five dimensions (Billing Accuracy, Payment Flexibility, Family Experience, Operational Efficiency, and Technology Integration), each scored independently and benchmarked against industry data calibrated to your facility type.
What You Get Back
- Overall Readiness Score (0-100): Your digital billing and payment maturity, benchmarked against the capabilities incoming demographics and competition will require in the next 3-5 years
- Dimension-Specific Scores: Where you are strong and where gaps exist
- Gap Analysis: Gaps that create immediate financial cost vs. gaps that represent emerging competitive risk
- Prioritized Recommendations: Actions ranked by impact and implementation complexity
- Peer Comparison: How your scores compare to other operators in your segment and size category
Who Should Take It
- Executive Directors: See whether your billing and payment operation meets the resident/family experience standard you set
- Business Office Managers: Quantify what you already sense about where time is wasted and processes break down
- CFOs: Get the data to build a business case
- IT Directors: Identify integration gaps creating manual workarounds
- Operators evaluating solutions: Establish your baseline before vendor conversations
Section 10:
What Life Looks Like After the Decision
What Life Looks Like After the Decision.
This Is Tuesday Morning After You Close the Gap.
It is 7:45 a.m. Your billing coordinator arrives, coffee in hand. In the old workflow, she would spend the next three days this week on payment processing: printing statements, stuffing envelopes, opening return mail, keying check amounts into PCC, reconciling against bank deposits, fielding phone calls from confused family members asking what they owe.
That workflow no longer exists.
She opens her dashboard. 127 of the community's 150 monthly billing and payment transactions have already resolved themselves. Autopay processed 62 payments at midnight, covering 41% of the guarantor base, paid automatically, posted to PCC automatically, reconciled automatically. Another 48 guarantors received their statements by text or email yesterday morning, and 43 of them paid through the embedded link within 24 hours. The payments posted to PCC the moment they were made. No manual entry. No batch upload.
Her active workload this morning is 23 transactions: 14 pending payments that have not yet come in, 6 flagged exceptions (a declined card, a disputed charge, a guarantor who changed bank accounts), and 3 new residents whose families need onboarding into the billing and payment system.
That is 40 minutes of work. Maybe an hour if the disputed charge requires a phone call.
The other 24 hours she used to spend? She is using two of them this morning to review the community's payer contracts for rate discrepancies, something the executive director asked about three months ago but nobody had bandwidth to touch. This afternoon, she is running a financial report the CFO needs for the board meeting. Tomorrow, she is calling four families proactively to walk them through an upcoming rate adjustment, reaching them before they see the new number on a statement and react with a phone call.
Not a headcount reduction. A role transformation. The billing office went from transaction processing center to financial operations hub.
Meanwhile, in Denver, a daughter named Sarah gets a text at 8:12 a.m.: "Statement available for Margaret Chen, Assisted Living, Unit 204." She taps the link. Her portion, 60% of the monthly charge, displays clearly. She sees her brother's 40% is listed separately under his name, billed to his email, not hers. She does not need to photograph anything, text anyone, or update a shared spreadsheet. She taps "Pay Now," confirms with Face ID, and it is done. Total time: 34 seconds. She has not called the business office once in the four months since her mother moved in.
Her brother in Chicago gets his own statement by email 90 minutes later, the delivery time he chose. He is on autopay. The email is a confirmation, not a request. His payment processed at midnight. He glances at it and archives it.
Back at the community, the admissions director is mid-tour with a family considering assisted living for their father. Three siblings will share the cost. The mother asks, "How does billing work when there are three of us paying?" The admissions director does not fumble. She does not say "We will mail you a statement." She says:
"If multiple family members share financial responsibility, each person gets their own statement for their portion. Each chooses how they receive it: text, email, or mail. You can pay by credit card, Apple Pay, or set up autopay so the payment happens automatically each month. There is a portal where you can see every statement and payment anytime. And you will never need to call us about a bill."
The three siblings look at each other. They toured two other communities yesterday. At one, the answer was "We will send the invoice to whoever is listed as responsible party." At the other, the business office manager was not available to answer billing questions during the tour.
This facility just became the frontrunner. Not because of the room. Not because of the dining program. Because this family's biggest anxiety, how are the three of us going to manage the money without it becoming a fight, just got answered with a real solution.
That is one Tuesday morning. One billing coordinator. One family in Denver. One family on a tour. One infrastructure decision made months ago that is now compounding across every interaction, every payment cycle, every admissions conversation, every month.
The demographic wave is real. The expectation gap is measurable. The cost of inaction is quantifiable. The competitive window is open right now. And the only question is whether you lead or follow.
What Your Future Residents Expect From Billing & Payment Experience.
73 Million Digitally Native Boomers Are Entering the Pipeline, but 75% of PCC Communities Are Not Ready.
We make getting paid easier.
The PointClickCare operators who build digital billing and payments around how families actually want to pay will win the next decade of admissions and reduce operating costs in the process.
This is the research, the math, and the playbook.
The Wave Is Here, and These Are Not Your Current Residents.
11,200 Americans Turn 65 Every Day. They Are Not Going to Tolerate a Paper Invoice.
The volume is staggering: 11,200 Americans cross the 65-year threshold every single day, a pace that holds through 2027. By 2030, all 73 million Baby Boomers will be 65 or older. The 80-and-over population, the segment most likely to need assisted living, memory care, and skilled nursing, grows 28% by 2030. Senior housing occupancy has hit 89.1% nationally after 18 consecutive quarters of growth, and the industry needs an estimated 806,000 new units by 2030 just to keep pace with demand.
Those are the numbers. Here is why they matter for your billing and payment operation specifically: the people filling those units are fundamentally different from the residents you serve today.
11,200 Americans turn 65 every single day. Every one of them managed money on a smartphone before they ever considered senior living.
Your next resident paid their mortgage from an app, split dinner on Venmo, and managed a portfolio on a tablet for 20 years before they ever considered senior living. They are not an outlier. Among adults aged 65 to 73, 91% own smartphones. That is not a niche tech-savvy slice. It is nearly everyone walking through your doors. 73% say technology is most important for managing their money, ranking it above health monitoring and social connection. 68% already use digital wallets. 82% prefer digital payments over paper. The average Baby Boomer owns seven connected devices. Mobile banking usage among adults 65+ grew 150% between 2019 and 2023.
This generation scheduled automatic transfers from banking apps, tracked investment portfolios on tablets, and managed every recurring bill digitally. They did not do these things occasionally. Digital financial management has been their default mode for two decades. A paper invoice arriving in the mail is not neutral to this population. It is a signal that your facility operates behind the curve, delivered at the exact moment a family is making a trust decision about care.
Now consider their adult children, the ones touring your facilities, signing admission agreements, and managing the bills. 62% of adults pay bills through fintech apps. Millennial and Gen X adult children carry near-100% digital expectations. They manage their own finances, their children's activities, and their households from their phones. They will expect to manage their parent's care bills the same way.
Your Current Residents Tolerate Paper. The Next Wave Will Not.
A text message has a 98% open rate. A piece of direct mail has a 20% open rate. That is the difference between a billing communication seen in minutes and one discarded unopened four out of five times. 55% of adults over 50 say they would consider changing providers if digital communication options were unavailable.
Your current residents tolerate paper billing because they have never expected anything else. The incoming wave will not tolerate it because they have always had something better. What works today will actively work against you tomorrow.
*Go deeper: "The Senior Living Demand Wave: What the Numbers Say About 2025-2030" | "Your New Residents Are More Digital Than You Think"*
Section 2: The Person Paying Your Bill Is Probably Not Your Resident.
The Person Paying Your Bill Is Probably Not Your Resident.
63 Million Caregivers Manage the Money. Their Expectations Are Even Higher.
Behind nearly every resident stands a family, often geographically scattered, emotionally stretched, and financially entangled with a billing and payment process that was never designed for them. And their expectations for how that process should work are not just high. They are higher than the residents' own expectations, because these are Millennials and Gen Xers who have never known anything but digital.
92% of caregivers handle finances for their loved ones in care. That is not an occasional check-in. It is active, ongoing financial management layered on top of their own lives, jobs, and families. There are now 63 million Americans serving as caregivers, a nearly 50% increase since 2015. Among them, 10 million are Millennials who have never written a rent check, let alone navigated a paper-based senior living billing process. 29% are sandwich generation caregivers simultaneously managing obligations to children and aging parents.
63 million Americans are now caregivers. 92% manage finances for their loved ones. 10 million are Millennials who have never written a check.
The Scene That Plays Out in Your Business Office Every Week
A daughter in Seattle and a son in Chicago are splitting the cost of their mother's assisted living care. The invoice arrives on paper, mailed to the daughter. She photographs it, texts it to her brother, and asks who can cover what this month. He Venmos her his share. She pays the full amount on her credit card to avoid a late fee, then spends the next week chasing reimbursement through a shared Google Sheet.
Your system sees one payment, from one payer, on time. Everything looks clean. But behind that single transaction is a fragile coordination process your operations never see and cannot support. That family is not unusual. It is the new normal.
When Billing Confusion Costs You Revenue You Already Earned
37% of caregivers report missing payments due to billing confusion, not inability to pay. They had the money. They intended to pay. The process defeated them. 70% spend two or more hours per month resolving billing errors. 80% carry out-of-pocket expenses averaging $7,242 per year related to caregiving.
Walk through the math on a 120-bed assisted living community. 90% occupancy means 108 active residents. If 30% of those accounts involve families splitting costs across two or more members, that is 30+ accounts where your billing office is managing multiple payers, each generating additional calls, reconciliation questions, and payment-timing confusion. At two extra billing interactions per split-pay account per month, that is 720 additional billing touchpoints per year that your system was never built to handle.
This is where multi-guarantor billing stops being a feature and becomes a necessity. When multiple family members share financial responsibility, each person needs their own bill, their own payment method, and their own communication preference. Treating a family as a single billing entity ignores the reality of how modern families actually manage care.
37% miss payments due to confusion. 70% spend 2+ hours monthly on billing errors. 720 extra touchpoints per year in a 120-bed community.
*Go deeper: "The Person Paying Your Bill Is Not Your Resident"*
Section 3: The 66-Point Gap.
The 66-Point Gap
91% of Families Are Digitally Capable. 75% of Communities Still Rely on Paper Checks.
Here is the uncomfortable math. 91% of the families paying your invoices bank on their phones, pay their mortgage from an app, and split a dinner tab with a two-second tap. Meanwhile, 75% of senior living communities still rely on paper checks as the primary payment method.
That is a 66-point gap between what your payers can do and what your operation allows them to do. And it does not close on its own. Every month, the share of your payer base that tolerates paper shrinks. Every month, the expectation for digital self-service grows. The gap widens.
91% of families can pay digitally. Only 25% of communities let them. That is a 66-point gap, and it widens every month.
The Infrastructure Deficit Runs Deeper Than Paper Checks
The paper-check number is not an outlier. It sits inside a broader infrastructure pattern. Only 35% of communities offer any kind of payment portal. Of those, only 18% have full integration with their EHR, meaning no manual data entry, no re-keying, and no reconciliation spreadsheets. Only 16% have a modern financial management system. Another 16% manage their entire financial operation through Excel. Only 9% use any form of AI or automation in their revenue cycle.
42% of finance staff time in senior living is consumed by manual billing and payment processing. Not analysis. Not forecasting. Processing: keying in check amounts, matching payments to accounts, chasing misapplied funds. Nearly half of your billing team's capacity goes to work that most industries automated a decade ago.
The Last Generation That Will Write You a Check
63% of Americans 65+ wrote a check in the last month. Among adults 18 to 24, that figure is 4%. The generation currently writing checks to your community is the last generation that will. The Millennials and older Gen Z entering caregiving roles do not use checks. Many do not own a checkbook. Some have never written one.
The demographic data is clear. The expectation gap is measurable. And the infrastructure deficit is quantifiable. The question is no longer whether your billing and payment process needs to change. The question is what happens when it does.
The answer, and this is where the story turns, is that a single infrastructure decision delivers three outcomes simultaneously.
Go deeper: "75% of Senior Living Communities Still Rely on Paper Checks. Here Is What That Actually Costs."
SECTION 4: ONE DECISION, THREE OUTCOMES
One Decision. Three Outcomes That Compound
What Happens When You Close the Gap Between Paper-Based Billing and a Fully Integrated Digital Platform Inside PCC.
Most operators evaluate billing and payment modernization through one lens: will it save us money? That framing undervalues the decision by two-thirds.
When a senior living community closes the gap between paper-based billing and a fully integrated digital billing and payment platform inside PointClickCare, three things happen concurrently. Not sequentially. Not "maybe if it goes well." Concurrently, from the same implementation, starting from the same decision.
Outcome 1
Families get the billing and payment experience they already expect. Residents and their adult children interact with payments the way they interact with every other financial obligation in their lives, digitally, on their own schedule, from their own devices, with each family member managing their own portion.
Outcome 2
Your operating costs drop measurably. Processing time falls 96%. Staff hours shift from manual transaction handling to strategic financial management. Revenue leakage from manual errors shrinks. Cash flow accelerates from weeks to next-day. And card acceptance costs the facility nothing.
Outcome 3
You gain a competitive advantage that paper-based competitors literally cannot match. 67% of families factor the billing and payment experience into their facility selection. Your admissions team gets a differentiator that shows up in tours, satisfaction scores, referral rates, and retention.
These are not three separate projects. They are three faces of one infrastructure decision. The sections that follow walk through each outcome with the specifics.
Section 5: Outcome 1
Families Get the Experience They Expect
Families Get the Experience They Already Expect.
What Modern Billing & Payments Actually Look Like Inside PointClickCare.
Most senior living operators believe they have a billing and payment system. They have PointClickCare. They have a merchant processor. They have a staff member who spends two days each month reconciling the two. That is not a system. It is a workaround held together by manual effort and institutional memory.
Here is what the billing and payment experience looks like when the infrastructure actually matches what families expect.
Native PCC Integration That Deserves the Word
Integration is the most overused term in senior living software. A vendor that imports a CSV from PCC and calls it "integrated" is using the word loosely. True native integration means bidirectional data sync: resident demographics, payer responsibility, charge details, and payment history flow from PCC into the billing and payment platform automatically. Confirmed payments post back to PCC ledgers without anyone touching a keyboard. Zero double entry. No batch uploads. No end-of-day reconciliation spreadsheets.
A simple test: if anyone on your team exports a file from PCC, reformats it, and uploads it to another system at any point during the billing cycle, you do not have integration. You have a manual bridge disguised as a technical connection.
If anyone on your team exports a file from PCC and uploads it somewhere else during the billing cycle, you do not have integration. You have a manual bridge.
Multi-Guarantor Billing: One Resident Rarely Means One Payer
A resident in assisted living. Her son in Dallas pays 60%. Her daughter in Chicago covers 40%. The son prefers autopay. The daughter wants an emailed statement so she can review before paying by card.
In a single-guarantor system, one of two things happens. Either the facility sends one statement to one contact and hopes the family sorts it out, or the billing coordinator manually calculates each share and tracks two payment streams outside of PCC. Both approaches fail.
Multi-guarantor billing solves this at the system level. Each guarantor receives their own statement for their allocated share. Each stores their own payment method. Each selects their own communication preference: paper, email, or text. Charge allocation follows the responsibility split defined in PCC, and adjustments propagate automatically when charges change.
No-Login, No-App Payments That Eliminate Friction
The fastest way to delay a payment is to make it difficult. A statement delivers via text or email with a single embedded payment link. The guarantor taps the link, confirms the amount, and pays. No account creation. No password. No app download. One tap from notification to completed transaction.
This is not a convenience feature. It is a collections strategy. Families managing a parent's care are busy and stressed. Asking them to create a portal account and remember credentials is asking them to prioritize your payment over everything else competing for their attention. A no-login payment link meets them where they already are, in their text messages and email inbox, and removes every obstacle between intent and action.
Credit Card, Apple Pay, and Digital Wallet Acceptance
Families pay the way they pay for everything else in their lives. Credit cards, debit cards, ACH, Apple Pay, digital wallets. The breadth of options matters, but the delivery mechanism matters more. When the payment link arrives by text, a family member can complete payment in under 60 seconds without leaving the message thread.
Autopay: Set It Once, Never Think About It Again
For the monthly charges that are largely consistent in senior living, autopay is a natural fit. Every guarantor who enrolls is a payment that arrives without a reminder, a follow-up call, or a late notice. The billing cycle for that guarantor is complete before it begins. Top-performing communities achieve 40%+ autopay enrollment, meaning nearly half of monthly revenue arrives automatically.
Per-Guarantor Communication Preferences
The daughter wants a text. The son wants an email. The aunt still wants paper. Each person chooses, and each person receives their bill exactly how they asked for it. From the same system. Automatically.
Automated Reconciliation and Level-of-Care Triggers
When a guarantor pays, the payment posts to the correct PCC ledger entry immediately. No manual matching. No batch posting. No reconciliation spreadsheet. When a resident moves from assisted living to memory care, the daily rate changes. A fully integrated platform detects care level changes in PCC automatically. The next statement reflects the new rate without manual adjustment. Without automatic triggers, the facility provides a higher level of care and bills for a lower one, creating quiet, recurring revenue leakage that compounds every month it goes undetected.
Go deeper: "You Already Run PointClickCare. You Are Just Not Using It for Billing & Payments."
Section 6: Outcome 2
Your Operating Costs Drop
Your Operating Costs Drop.
Better for Families AND Cheaper to Operate. The Math Works in Both Directions.
Most business decisions in senior living are tradeoffs. Better care quality costs more. Higher staffing ratios strain budgets. Upgraded amenities require capital investment. You are constantly choosing between "better" and "cheaper."
Digital billing and payment transformation is the rare decision where both happen simultaneously. The improvements that make the experience easier for families are the same improvements that reduce cost, accelerate cash flow, and recover staff capacity. That is not marketing language. It is arithmetic, and the numbers are specific enough to run for your own community.
The $4.54 Gap: Cost Per Transaction
Start with a single billing transaction: one statement sent, one payment collected, one ledger entry posted.
In a manual workflow, that transaction takes approximately 10 minutes of staff time. At a fully loaded billing staff cost of $47.58 per hour, those 10 minutes cost $7.93. In a digital workflow, the same transaction takes approximately 15 seconds and costs $3.39 fully loaded, including platform fees.
The difference is $4.54 per transaction, a 57% cost reduction and a 96% reduction in time.
An Easy Cost Comparison
Manual Process:
10 minutes / $7.93 per transaction
Digital Process:
15 seconds / $3.39 per transaction
Total Savings:
$4.54 per transaction / 96% less time
Community-Level Math: 150 Transactions, 25 Hours, One Billing Cycle
A 100-bed community with an average of 1.5 guarantors per resident processes 150 billing and payment transactions per month.
Manual: 150 transactions at 10 minutes each = 25 hours of staff time per cycle. That is more than three full workdays every month dedicated to generating, sending, collecting, posting, and reconciling payments.
Digital: 150 transactions at 15 seconds each = 40 minutes per cycle.
The difference is 24 hours and 20 minutes per month. At $4.54 savings per transaction, that is $681 per month, or $8,172 per year for a single community. For a 10-community portfolio, the math scales directly to $81,720 per year.
Card Acceptance That Costs You Nothing
Here is the cost objection that stops most billing and payment modernization conversations: "We cannot absorb credit card processing fees on $5,900 monthly charges."
You do not have to. Convenience fee pass-through shifts the processing cost to the payer as a disclosed, optional service fee. The payer sees the fee clearly before confirming and can choose ACH to avoid it.
69% of payers accept the convenience fee and pay with their preferred card without hesitation. On a $5,900 assisted living charge, that means the facility gains all the collection speed, family satisfaction, and cash flow benefits of card acceptance while absorbing none of the 2.5% to 3.5% processing cost. At scale across 100+ residents, that is $15,000 to $25,000 per year in processing fees the facility never touches.
Card acceptance is not a cost. It is a free accelerator for every other financial improvement on this page.
69% of families accept the convenience fee. Card processing costs the facility nothing. You gain all the speed and satisfaction benefits without absorbing the cost.
Cash Flow Acceleration: From Weeks to Next-Day
Paper billing operates on mail time. Statement prints, enters the postal system, arrives in 3 to 5 days, sits on a counter, gets opened, a check is written and mailed back. End to end: 2 to 3 weeks from statement generation to cleared funds.
Digital billing and payments compress this to hours. Statement delivers by text or email instantly. The guarantor pays the same day. Funds settle next business day.
For a community with $500,000 in monthly private-pay charges, a 16-day acceleration means $50,000 to $100,000 more in working capital at any given time, money that was previously trapped in mail transit and check clearing.
Paper: 2-3 weeks to cleared funds. Digital: next-day settlement. Working capital impact: $50K-$100K+ for a 100-bed community.
Revenue Leakage: The Money You Already Earned But Never Collected
Revenue leakage is the term for charges that should have been billed but were not: services delivered, care levels changed, ancillary items consumed, none of which made it onto an invoice. In manual environments, leakage on ancillary charges alone can reach 30%.
For a 100-bed community with $30,000 in monthly ancillary charges, a 30% leakage rate means $9,000 per month in unbilled services, or $108,000 per year. Communities that move to fully integrated billing and payments typically recover 15% to 20% of total ancillary revenue in the first year: $54,000 to $72,000 returned to the top line. Not new revenue. Revenue that was already earned and simply never collected.
Staff Capacity Recovery: Not a Headcount Cut. A Role Elevation.
42% of finance staff time goes to manual billing and payment processing. Automating these workflows does not eliminate positions. It returns nearly half of a team's capacity to work that was crowded out: resident trust account management, payer contract reviews, proactive family communication, financial reports the executive director has been requesting but nobody had bandwidth to produce.
A billing coordinator who spent 25 hours per month on payment processing now spends 40 minutes. The remaining hours go to work that manual processes crowded out for years.
42% of finance staff time consumed by manual billing and payment processing. Automation does not cut headcount. It gives your team back nearly half their week.
Go deeper: "75% of Senior Living Communities Still Rely on Paper Checks. Here Is What That Actually Costs."
SECTION 7: OUTCOME 3, THE COMPETITIVE EDGE NOBODY IS USING YET
The Competitive Edge Nobody Is Using Yet.
Your Tours Show Families What Life Looks Like. Your Billing & Payments Show Them What It Feels Like.
Every senior living community knows how to give a good tour. You show the rooms. You highlight the dining program. You walk through the activity calendar. You introduce key staff. But almost nobody talks about billing and payments during the tour. That is a missed opportunity, because families are already making judgments about your facility based on how you handle the financial experience, whether you bring it up or not.
67% of Families Use the Billing & Payment Experience as a Decision Filter
67% of families say they would choose a facility that accepts card payments over one that does not, all else being equal. That is not a soft preference. That is two-thirds of your prospective families making a binary judgment based on how you handle payments.
67% of bill payers would choose a card-accepting facility over one that does not. That is not a preference. It is a decision filter.
Two communities sit three miles apart. Similar amenities. Similar staffing. Similar price. One accepts cards, offers Apple Pay, and provides a 24/7 payment portal. The other mails paper invoices and accepts checks. For two out of three families evaluating both, the billing and payment experience alone tilts the decision.
Satisfaction Is Not About the Price. It Is About the Experience of Paying It.
J.D. Power's 2024 assisted living and memory care study scored the industry at 855 out of 1,000. The largest single-category satisfaction gain: a 24-point improvement in "price paid for services." That category does not measure whether families think the price is fair. It measures how they experience the financial relationship.
Families did not decide $5,900 per month was a bargain. What changed was clarity, predictability, and ease of payment. The billing and payment experience improved. Satisfaction followed.
The Conversion Math That Makes Every Differentiator Count
Assisted living converts 6% to 10% of leads. At those margins, a 2-point improvement is transformative. A 100-unit community generating 400 leads per year at 7% conversion produces 28 move-ins. At 9%, that is 36. Eight additional move-ins at $5,900 per month equals $566,400 in annualized revenue.
Turnover Economics: The Cost of Losing Residents You Did Not Have to Lose
Assisted living median annual turnover is 46.8%. Unit turnover costs $1,000 to $5,000 per unit, covering vacancy loss, marketing spend, move-in coordination, and administrative processing. A 100-unit community absorbs $46,800 to $234,000 per year in turnover costs at that rate. Not every turn is preventable. But billing and payment friction is one of the few turnover drivers that operators can eliminate entirely through infrastructure. If improved clarity prevents even five additional departures, savings range from $5,000 to $25,000.
The Tour Conversation That Changes the Decision
Imagine your admissions counselor adding this to the financial overview:
"If multiple family members share financial responsibility, each person gets their own statement for their portion. Each chooses how they receive it: text, email, or mail. You can pay by credit card, Apple Pay, or set up autopay so the payment happens automatically each month. There is a portal where you can see every statement and payment anytime. You will never need to call us about a bill."
The family across the table exchanges a glance. They have just toured two other communities where the answer to "How does billing work?" was "We will mail you a statement." Your facility just became the frontrunner, not because of the room size or the menu, but because you solved one of the biggest anxieties families carry into the admissions process: how are we going to manage the money?
And families talk. The daughter who had a seamless experience tells her book club. The son who split costs with his sister without a single phone call mentions it to a coworker whose parents are aging. Positive billing and payment experiences become word-of-mouth referrals your marketing budget could never buy.
The Competitive Window Is Three to Five Years
The 806,000 new units projected by 2030 will not be built around paper billing. They will launch with digital payment portals and integrated financial workflows from day one. Today, modern billing and payments are a differentiator. By 2030, they will be table stakes. The operators who modernize now gain a temporary but meaningful advantage during the highest-growth period the industry has ever seen. The operators who wait will compete against new-build communities where digital billing and payments are simply assumed.
Go deeper: "How Smart PCC Customers Are Turning Billing & Payments Into a Competitive Advantage"
SECTION 8: WHERE DOES YOUR COMMUNITY STAND?
Where Does Your Community Stand?
Industry Benchmarks by Segment, Facility Type, and Technology Adoption.
The benchmarks below represent current performance across the five primary PCC care settings. These are your peers. The value is not in the numbers themselves. It is in the gap between where your community operates and where the segment center sits.
1
Occupancy
Independent living leads at 90.2%. CCRCs hold at 89.2%. Assisted living at 87.7%. Memory care ranges from 85% to 90%. Skilled nursing sits at 83.3%. At these levels, every operational advantage matters, including the billing and payment experience that shapes satisfaction and referral likelihood.
2
Private-Pay Mix
Your private-pay percentage determines how much impact a digital billing and payment solution has. Independent living is 90%+ private pay. Memory care exceeds 80%. CCRCs run around 85%. Assisted living sits at 66%. Skilled nursing ranges from 23% to 34%. For every segment where private pay dominates, billing and payment modernization affects the vast majority of transactions with no intermediary, no claims processor, and no reimbursement schedule. The community controls the entire experience.
3
Monthly Pricing
Independent living averages $4,098/month. Assisted living averages $5,900. Memory care averages $8,749. When families pay $5,900 to $8,749 per month, they expect a billing and payment experience that matches the price point. A paper invoice with a return envelope does not match.
4
Technology Adoption
35% of communities offer a payment portal. 18% have full EHR integration. 80% of SNFs have adopted EHR, but assisted living lags at 48%. Only 9% use any AI or automation. The clinical record is digital. The care plan is digital. The billing statement is a PDF in an email or a paper invoice in a stamped envelope. The gap between clinical technology and billing and payment technology is where the opportunity sits.
5
Operating Margins
Independent living: 25-30%. Assisted living: 10-20%. Memory care: 12-18%. CCRCs: 15-25%. Skilled nursing: 1.8-2.1%, with 47-59% of SNFs operating at negative margins. At every margin level, dollars recovered through faster collections, fewer write-offs, and reduced administrative labor drop directly to the bottom line.
Go deeper: "2025 Senior Living Benchmarks by Facility Type"
SECTION 9: MEASURE WHERE YOU STAND
Take the PCC Digital Billing & Payment Readiness Assessment
See Where Your Facility Stands Against Industry Benchmarks in Five Minutes.
You have seen the industry data. You know the benchmarks. Now see where your specific facility stands.
The assessment evaluates your operation across five dimensions (Billing Accuracy, Payment Flexibility, Family Experience, Operational Efficiency, and Technology Integration), each scored independently and benchmarked against industry data calibrated to your facility type.
What You Get Back
- Overall Readiness Score (0-100): Your digital billing and payment maturity, benchmarked against the capabilities incoming demographics and competition will require in the next 3-5 years
- Dimension-Specific Scores: Where you are strong and where gaps exist
- Gap Analysis: Gaps that create immediate financial cost vs. gaps that represent emerging competitive risk
- Prioritized Recommendations: Actions ranked by impact and implementation complexity
- Peer Comparison: How your scores compare to other operators in your segment and size category
Who Should Take It
- Executive Directors: See whether your billing and payment operation meets the resident/family experience standard you set
- Business Office Managers: Quantify what you already sense about where time is wasted and processes break down
- CFOs: Get the data to build a business case
- IT Directors: Identify integration gaps creating manual workarounds
- Operators evaluating solutions: Establish your baseline before vendor conversations
SECTION 10: WHAT LIFE LOOKS LIKE AFTER THE DECISION
What Life Looks Like After the Decision.
This Is Tuesday Morning After You Close the Gap.
It is 7:45 a.m. Your billing coordinator arrives, coffee in hand. In the old workflow, she would spend the next three days this week on payment processing: printing statements, stuffing envelopes, opening return mail, keying check amounts into PCC, reconciling against bank deposits, fielding phone calls from confused family members asking what they owe.
That workflow no longer exists.
She opens her dashboard. 127 of the community's 150 monthly billing and payment transactions have already resolved themselves. Autopay processed 62 payments at midnight, covering 41% of the guarantor base, paid automatically, posted to PCC automatically, reconciled automatically. Another 48 guarantors received their statements by text or email yesterday morning, and 43 of them paid through the embedded link within 24 hours. The payments posted to PCC the moment they were made. No manual entry. No batch upload.
Her active workload this morning is 23 transactions: 14 pending payments that have not yet come in, 6 flagged exceptions (a declined card, a disputed charge, a guarantor who changed bank accounts), and 3 new residents whose families need onboarding into the billing and payment system.
That is 40 minutes of work. Maybe an hour if the disputed charge requires a phone call.
The other 24 hours she used to spend? She is using two of them this morning to review the community's payer contracts for rate discrepancies, something the executive director asked about three months ago but nobody had bandwidth to touch. This afternoon, she is running a financial report the CFO needs for the board meeting. Tomorrow, she is calling four families proactively to walk them through an upcoming rate adjustment, reaching them before they see the new number on a statement and react with a phone call.
Not a headcount reduction. A role transformation. The billing office went from transaction processing center to financial operations hub.
Meanwhile, in Denver, a daughter named Sarah gets a text at 8:12 a.m.: "Statement available for Margaret Chen, Assisted Living, Unit 204." She taps the link. Her portion, 60% of the monthly charge, displays clearly. She sees her brother's 40% is listed separately under his name, billed to his email, not hers. She does not need to photograph anything, text anyone, or update a shared spreadsheet. She taps "Pay Now," confirms with Face ID, and it is done. Total time: 34 seconds. She has not called the business office once in the four months since her mother moved in.
Her brother in Chicago gets his own statement by email 90 minutes later, the delivery time he chose. He is on autopay. The email is a confirmation, not a request. His payment processed at midnight. He glances at it and archives it.
Back at the community, the admissions director is mid-tour with a family considering assisted living for their father. Three siblings will share the cost. The mother asks, "How does billing work when there are three of us paying?" The admissions director does not fumble. She does not say "We will mail you a statement." She says:
"If multiple family members share financial responsibility, each person gets their own statement for their portion. Each chooses how they receive it: text, email, or mail. You can pay by credit card, Apple Pay, or set up autopay so the payment happens automatically each month. There is a portal where you can see every statement and payment anytime. And you will never need to call us about a bill."
The three siblings look at each other. They toured two other communities yesterday. At one, the answer was "We will send the invoice to whoever is listed as responsible party." At the other, the business office manager was not available to answer billing questions during the tour.
This facility just became the frontrunner. Not because of the room. Not because of the dining program. Because this family's biggest anxiety, how are the three of us going to manage the money without it becoming a fight, just got answered with a real solution.
That is one Tuesday morning. One billing coordinator. One family in Denver. One family on a tour. One infrastructure decision made months ago that is now compounding across every interaction, every payment cycle, every admissions conversation, every month.
The demographic wave is real. The expectation gap is measurable. The cost of inaction is quantifiable. The competitive window is open right now. And the only question is whether you lead or follow.