For the 2025–26 financial year, every residential aged care provider in Australia faces a new compliance milestone. The Aged Care Financial Report (ACFR), due October 2026 must include a Care Minutes Performance Statement (CMPS) — and that statement must be independently audited by a registered company auditor under ASAE 3000.
This isn't a minor reporting tweak. It is a structural shift in how the sector is held accountable. Care minutes reporting moves from self-reported quarterly data with occasional targeted audits, to annual independent assurance across every provider, every year.
If you've ever pulled a care minutes report together at the last minute from rosters, payroll exports and a few spreadsheets, this is the year that stops being viable.
What the Statement requires
The CMPS sits inside the 2025–26 ACFR and covers the full financial year. Providers must report and have audited:
- Quarterly direct care labour costs, split by employee and agency
- Quarterly direct care labour worked hours, split by employee and agency
- Care minutes delivered
- 24/7 Registered Nurse coverage
- Occupied bed days.
The audit will be performed under ASAE 3000 which is the assurance standard for engagements other than audits of historical financial information. Auditors will follow Department-published guidance and use prescribed audit report templates, ranging from an unmodified opinion through to qualified, adverse and disclaimed opinions.
There is real money at stake. If your audited CMPS figures don't match what you reported quarterly, the Department may recalculate your Care Minutes Supplement — currently worth up to $33.41 per resident per day for providers meeting 100% of both total care and RN care minute targets. For an average-sized home, that is six-figure territory annually.
Why the audit is harder than it looks
The data items in the CMPS aren't new — providers have been reporting them quarterly through the QFR. What is new is the requirement to reconcile those numbers across systems and present them in a form that withstands independent scrutiny.
In most aged care organisations, care minutes data lives in at least four places:
- The rostering or time and attendance system (where the hours sit)
- The payroll and finance ledger (where the cost sits)
- The HR system (where staff classifications sit)
- A care minutes tracking tool or spreadsheet (where the calculation sits)
When those systems don't reconcile cleanly, and they rarely do without deliberate design, discrepancies that used to disappear inside a quarterly submission become audit findings. Agency staff are the most common pain point, because their hours and costs often sit outside the rostering platform entirely.
ASAE 3000 assurance is not a reconciliation exercise alone. The auditor will want to understand your control environment, sample evidence, test the data flow end-to-end, and form an opinion on whether the Statement is materially correct. That is a different conversation to “send us the QFR and we’ll have a look”.
Where Mirus Metrics fits in
Mirus Metrics is a connected data and insights platform built to address this gap. It includes Care Minute Manager, which helps providers track and report care minutes, and Revenue Manager, which provides visibility into AN-ACC performance and funding outcomes.
Care Minute Manager automatically calculates minutes per resident per day directly from your time and attendance system — for both permanent and agency staff. Hours, classifications and cost flow into a single reconciled view, so the number on your QFR is the same number on your roster and the same number you hand the auditor. The built-in QFR function gives a detailed view of labour hours by staff type and facility, broken down between permanent and agency roles. The exact split the CMPS requires.
Revenue Manager extends that visibility further, giving real-time insight into AN-ACC performance, forecasted classifications and the care minute targets they generate. The Cost of Gap report shows where funding and care minute delivery are out of alignment before the quarter closes, not after.
Mirus Metrics is ISO 27001 ready, so the security and access controls an auditor will probe are already in place.
In practical terms, that means when your auditor asks "show me the source data for the June 2026 figure", the answer is a system extract, not a six-week project.
What to do now
Three priorities for the next quarter:
- Engage your auditor early. Not every auditor is set up for ASAE 3000 engagements over workforce data. Confirm in writing that yours is or find one who is.
- Map your data flow. Document where every CMPS data item originates, how it moves, and who can vouch for it. If there are manual handoffs, fix them before 30 June 2026.
- Reconcile your QFR submissions now. Don't wait until October to discover that four quarters of self-reported data don't add up to your annual position.
The CMPS isn't a one-off. It's the new annual rhythm. Providers who get the foundations right this year will run the process in days, not weeks, every year after. That is the prize worth aiming for and it is the conversation we'd genuinely like to have with you.
