The dietary manager at an assisted living community puts in the week's food order with the distributor on a Tuesday morning. Down the hall the maintenance director is buying a water heater for a unit turnover, and the activities director has a craft supply order going out for the month. By Friday the three invoices are sitting with the business office manager, who stamps each one received and keys it into accounting, and the home office has not seen any of them.
Procurement at an assisted living operator is one loop at each community, where a department head places an order, the community approves it and receives the goods, the invoice is matched to the order, and the bill goes to accounting for payment. The home office sets the vendors, the approval roles, the budget per resident per day and the accounting connection once, then watches that same loop at every community in one place.
The loop itself is the same one a skilled building runs. What changes in assisted living is who is placing the orders and what the budget gets divided by. The orders come from dietary, housekeeping, activities and maintenance, and from the care director in a community with a memory care wing or a higher acuity mix. The budget is divided by the residents in the building that day, and the monthly fee for each of those residents is what the spend has to fit under.
The order and the approval
The food order goes in as a purchase order, with the quantities and the prices the dietary manager expects to pay, before the truck is loaded. If the executive director has to sign off on it, that step is tied to the executive director role. When that person leaves, the next executive director inherits the step, and nobody has to rebuild the rule.
Turnover is the reason that matters. Business office managers and executive directors change, and an approval rule built around a name stops working the day the name is gone. We wrote up what happens to approvals when an administrator leaves after go-live, and an executive director leaving is the same case.
The invoice and the match
The distributor's invoice arrives by email or rides in on the truck. It is captured and lined up against the purchase order and the receiving record, and any line that differs is flagged on the invoice. A case of thickened juice invoiced above the ordered price carries that flag when the bill reaches its approver, and an operator that wants such invoices held can set an approval rule to do it.
The Price Discrepancies Report puts the ordered price and the invoiced price next to each other against the contract or GPO price, line by line. The report does not know why a price moved. A contract that renewed at a new rate and a distributor that keyed the wrong item look the same on it until someone at the home office asks.
We walked through how the match works, and the ways it breaks, in what a three-way match compares. Once the bill clears, it goes to accounting for payment. We connect to QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics for that, so the bill is not keyed a second time at the home office.
What the home office sees
The home office sets a supply budget per resident per day for each community. The census that divides it comes over from the EHR every day, from MatrixCare or PointClickCare, so a move-out keyed today is in tomorrow's number. That depends on the EHR being kept up. If the move-out is not keyed there, the budget keeps counting that resident until it is.
We do not pick the budget number. The controller sets it from the group's own spend, and for a new customer it takes us about 45 days to collect all of that spend data, so the first budget comparisons worth acting on come after that. We covered how a per patient day budget moves when the census moves separately.
Across a group of communities the home office sees that same loop at each one. The approval roles are set once and the budget math is the same everywhere, so the controller can tell which community is over budget and on which line without calling the business office manager first. The longer version, including what breaks when each building runs its own, is how multi-location LTC operators control procurement across their facilities.
Questions assisted living controllers ask
does adelpo work for assisted living communities?
Yes, assisted living operators run their purchasing and AP on Adelpo today. The census for the per-resident-day budget comes over from the EHR each day. MatrixCare lists senior living as one of its integration types on its partner marketplace page, which we read on Oct 6, 2026.
who should approve purchases at an assisted living community?
That is the group's call. Whichever seat it sits in, the executive director's or the business office manager's, set the approval on the role and the rule stays when the person goes. In Adelpo a step can also be set to one named person when a group wants that, and removed easily when the need ends.
what does procurement software need to do for a multi-community assisted living group?
It needs an approval step tied to a role so the rule survives turnover, one place where every community's invoices land and get matched to the order, a budget per resident per day that follows the census, and a connection to the accounting system so the bill is keyed once. The test is whether the home office can see which community is over budget and on which line without making a phone call.
how long does it take to roll out procurement software across assisted living communities?
For Adelpo, a single community takes 3 to 4 weeks to go live, and a large portfolio rollout runs 8 to 16 weeks from start to finish. Those are our figures. Any vendor you compare us against should give you theirs with the same split, one community and the whole portfolio.