Staffing a senior care facility shouldn’t mean calling an expensive agency and hoping someone shows up. That’s the problem KARE set out to fix. Their app-based staffing marketplace connects caregivers, nurses, and hospitality staff (called “HEROes”) directly with senior care communities for on-demand shift coverage. Workers pick shifts that fit their schedule and get paid instantly through HERO Real-Time Pay™, no more waiting two weeks for a paycheck. With 82% of nursing homes facing chronic staffing shortages, the demand is real. KARE already operates across ~1,300–1,400 communities and is expanding into therapy staffing and workforce management through their NASTi platform.

Use Case

KARE is building a scheduling and time & attendance platform to become the source of truth for hours worked in senior care. To close the loop, they needed two things: the ability to write completed timesheet data (hours worked, overtime, shift differentials, holiday pay) back into their customers’ payroll systems, and the ability to read employee census data (demographics, pay rates, pay periods) to automate onboarding. With ~1,400 companies on the platform and a different payroll provider behind each door, this quickly became an engineering problem bigger than the product itself.

This isn’t just a story about connecting to payroll systems (though it’s a good one). It’s about what happens when a company stops spending engineering cycles on plumbing and starts building the product that actually differentiates them. KARE went from facing an integration problem that threatened to consume more dev resources than the marketplace itself, to writing timesheets across 65+ providers through a single API.

• Integration deployment time reduced from weeks of custom development to under 48 hours
• $150,000+ annual savings in engineering resources redirected to core product
• New provider integrations built by Bindbee in 7–14 days at no extra cost
• 80%+ faster client onboarding with automated employee data sync replacing manual imports

A Fragmented Payroll Landscape at Scale

Integration requirements:

• Bidirectional sync: write timesheet data to payroll and read employee records from HRIS
• Support for Paycom, ADP, Workday, Paycor, QuickBooks, and multiple PEOs
• Automated employee onboarding with no manual CSV imports or Excel manipulation

Payroll Fragmentation: KARE’s customers use a wide mix of payroll providers, and each one expects time data in a different format. Structuring hours worked, overtime, shift differentials, and holiday pay correctly for every system was a nightmare. Having their dev team build one-off integrations for each provider didn’t make sense, especially at their scale.

Manual Onboarding Bottleneck: Getting employee data into KARE’s system was entirely manual. They needed an automated way to pull employee census data from whatever HRIS the customer was running and keep it synced. Their end users are community schedulers at senior living facilities, not technical staff. ETL workflows involving spreadsheets weren’t going to work. And with ~1,400 companies already on the platform, the variety of payroll systems they’d encounter made building individual integrations completely impractical.

Bindbee’s Unified API gave KARE a single integration point to connect with 65+ HRIS and payroll providers. Instead of building separate connectors for ADP, Workday, Paycom, and the rest, KARE integrates once and gets a consistent data format across every provider.

Bidirectional Read/Write: This was the big one. KARE can both pull employee data and write back timesheets and time-off entries through the same API. The write format stays consistent across all connectors. As Sean put it, they “set the logic up one time” and don’t have to reconfigure it per provider. One integration, one format, every payroll system.

Scoping Controls: KARE can toggle off data categories they don’t need (bank info, benefits) and disable individual fields (like marital status). This gave their customers confidence about exactly what data was being shared, which matters when you’re working with senior care facilities that take data privacy seriously.

White-Label Embedded SDK: Bindbee’s embeddable connection flow lives inside KARE’s own product, fully white-labeled. Useful for their phased rollout: manual control now, monetized integrations within the product later.

Custom Fields and Webhooks: For edge cases where the unified data model doesn’t cover something (like cost center IDs), KARE pulls raw fields through Custom Fields. Webhooks notify them when employee data changes, keeping their system current without heavy polling.