Lottie Buys CareMaster to Automate Billing in UK Care Homes

Lottie has acquired CareMaster, a 25-year-old care billing system used in more than 750 UK homes. The London company wants Found, its care CRM, and CareMaster to support £3 billion of annual invoicing by the first half of 2027, up from more than £1 billion through Found now.

CareMaster brings nearly 75 providers, and 25 years of rules for split bills, onto that platform. Will Donnelly, co-founder and chief executive of Lottie, said the next build is payments and credit control, then the rest of the path from a family’s first enquiry to a provider getting paid.

CareMaster Handles the Invoices Councils Keep Changing

CareMaster is not a new cloud suite. It is a resident-records and invoicing system for residential and nursing homes, written for the ugly bit of the job: the same person can be billed to a council, the NHS and the family in one month, and each payer runs a different calendar.

Its own product pages still sell a desktop-era strength. The software posts invoices straight into Sage 50, with a later link to Xero, so finance teams do not re-key lines. It also stores unique local authority invoicing arrangements, including special layouts, because most councils still insist on their own cycle and their own form.

WHAT CAREMASTER STILL DOES BY HAND

• Split funders: Local authority, health authority and Funded Nursing Care lines can sit on one resident, then roll into repeat bills.
• Late fee uplifts: A global rate tool updates many records at once, and it can backdate the change when a council posts the new price late.
• Room-level occupancy: Homes can keep a history for each room and run expected-income reports against current beds.
• Group and bureau use: The same system runs on a single home, a multi-home group, a local network or a wide-area setup, and bureaus can run it for clients.

That is the 25-year book Lottie is buying. Found already sells a billing add-on that can fire a cycle of invoices and keep a digital record of backdated funder changes. CareMaster’s edge is the installed base and the local-authority paperwork those 75 providers already live inside.

A £2.36 Billion Gap Makes Credit Control the Next Bottleneck

On 2 October 2026, the same day the deal was announced, Care England published Priced to Fail. The trade body said local authorities are underpaying for older people’s residential and nursing care by £2.36 billion a year in 2025/26, the highest figure it has recorded, and 49% above the cash shortfall in 2022/23.

Professor Martin Green, Care England’s chief executive, said the system is “being underfunded to the tune of £2.36bn every single year, and that the gap is getting worse, not better.” He put about half a million people in English care homes. The 2025/26 widening was 27%, which Care England tied to the National Living Wage and employer National Insurance, with council fee uplifts failing to keep pace.

THE FEE SHORTFALL CARE ENGLAND COUNTED

Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government figures show net current spending on adult social care in England rose by £1.3 billion, or 4.9% in real terms, to £27.4 billion in 2025-26. Care England’s April 2026 reading of King’s Fund work still had people who pay for themselves charged 41% more than councils pay for the same care. Software cannot close a fee gap of that size. It can change how fast a home issues the invoice, chases the council and records a part-payment from the family.

Beds are not sitting empty in the way operators feared a few years ago. Department of Health and Social Care figures for the week ending 14 August 2026 show 86.8% of total beds were occupied, with 10.2% vacant and admittable and 3.0% vacant and not admittable. Responding homes, 91.9% of the total, counted 355,809 residents. Home-care agencies that replied, 81.2% of that market, were supporting 489,732 people.

THE WORKFORCE THE BILLS SIT ON

• Filled posts: Skills for Care put filled adult social care jobs in England at 1.59 million in 2025/26, up 22,000, or 1.4%, the slowest rise in four years.
• Vacancies: The same report counted 96,000 vacant posts and a 6.2% vacancy rate, the lowest since 2015/16, though still about three times the wider economy.
• Demand ahead: Skills for Care said the sector could need a further 410,000 posts by 2040 if the workforce grows with the population aged 65 and over.
• Digital records: An estimated 83.6% of CQC-registered adult social care locations had a digital social care record by June 2026, against 79.3% a year earlier, so clinical notes are moving faster than the money file.

A decade-low vacancy rate does not free the finance clerk who is matching three payers to one resident. Credit control is where Lottie is pointing the new AI work, because that is the remaining manual pile once occupancy software already knows who is in the bed.

Fewer Than 100 Homes, Then a Rebuild

Lottie bought Found in May 2022, when the CRM ran in fewer than 100 care home locations. Found had been built in 2019 by Dan Morris as occupancy and enquiry software. Lottie rebuilt it as an AI-native product, added home care and supported living, and now publishes a live count of trusted by 1,700+ care services across care homes and home care. The CareMaster announcement says that book will be nearly 2,500 UK care services by the end of 2026.

The public Found site already lists three paid jobs besides the CRM: occupancy, billing, and Eliza, an AI enquiry handler launched in April 2026. Billing is an optional add-on on the Pro plan, which starts at £150 per location per month. Starter starts at £75, or is free for Lottie marketplace partners. Found says care teams using it convert 45% more enquiries, cut marketing spend by 17% on average, and can reduce administrative staff costs by up to 14% a year.

Those are vendor figures, not an independent audit. They do show what Lottie thinks the product is for: fill the bed, then bill the stay, then pick up the phone when a family calls. CareMaster’s 750 locations are, on average, 10 homes per provider, a group-scale finance book rather than a long tail of single homes.

What the 24-Month Tie-Up Bought

Bob Grimshaw and Colin Rooke, CareMaster’s co-founders, said they have been with the Lottie team for 24 months already. The legal close is new. The working relationship is not. Their statement is the closest thing the deal has to a migration plan: partners move onto Found, and the old billing brain comes with them.

Joining the Lottie team over the past 24 months has been a brilliant experience. It’s clear that Will and the wider Found team care as much about our partners as we do. We’re confident Lottie is the right home for CareMaster, and we couldn’t be more excited to see our partners migrating to a far more advanced, future-proofed platform.

Bob Grimshaw and Colin Rooke, co-founders, CareMaster

No price was published. No country list was published for the international push Lottie says will follow. What the buyers did name is sequence: credit control first, then more of the customer journey. Grimshaw and Rooke’s value is the memory of how each council wants the invoice, and which resident records break when a Funded Nursing Care rate moves.

If that knowledge stays in two founders’ heads, the deal is a customer list. If it is written into Found’s billing engine, Lottie gets something harder to copy than another CRM screen: a library of local-authority exceptions, tested on 750 homes.

Lottie’s Marketplace Now Feeds the Invoice Book

Lottie did not start as back-office software. Brothers Will and Chris Donnelly launched it in July 2021 after a hard search for care for their grandmother, and named it after Charlottes in the family. The consumer site is still free. Lottie now works with more than 4,000 vetted providers across care homes, home care and retirement living, and says it has raised over £20 million from Accel, General Catalyst and Kindred, with early cheques from Tom Blomfield and Dave Wascha.

Will, who spent five years at CBRE before the startup, is chief executive. Julien Lavigne du Cadet, formerly CTO at ZOE, joined as chief product and technology officer in March 2025. The about page still lists Seniorcare, an employee benefit used by DHL, Diageo and Unilever, as one way the firm is paid so the family marketplace can stay free. Eliza is the other recent product: an out-of-hours and overflow enquiry bot that records every call and chat for the home.

THE SOFTWARE ROLL-UP

1. May 2022: Lottie acquires Found, then in fewer than 100 care home locations, to run enquiries and occupancy for homes on the marketplace.
2. Early 2026: After 12 months of rebuild work, Found 2.0 is offered as one AI-native system from first enquiry to resident billing.
3. April 2026: Eliza launches as an AI enquiry handler for overflow, out-of-hours and 24/7 cover.
4. 2 October 2026: Lottie acquires CareMaster and says partners will migrate onto Found, with credit control next on the AI list.

The commercial logic is a closed loop. A family finds a home on Lottie. The home runs the enquiry in Found, optionally through Eliza. Occupancy shows the empty room. Billing, now deepened by CareMaster, sends the invoice. Credit control, still to be built, chases the council or the relative. Marketplace partners already get Found Starter free, so the paid upsell is occupancy, call tracking and billing.

Max Read, managing director of Visiting Angels in North London, said Found’s AI and workflow automations “give my team hours back every week to focus on non-administrative work.” Aly Kachra, owner and co-CEO of Country Court, called Found the group’s “trusted digital and technology partner.” Those are customer lines on a product page, not a sector survey, and they sit on the enquiry and occupancy side. The unpaid invoice is the part CareMaster is meant to finish.

£3 Billion of Invoices by Mid-2027

Lottie’s own forecast is a straight climb in the value of bills running through the combined platforms. Found already processes more than £1 billion a year. The firm projects £2 billion by the end of 2026 and £3 billion by the first half of 2027 once CareMaster’s book is on Found.

INVOICING LOTTIE SAYS IT WILL CARRY

Donnelly framed social care as a huge service industry that still runs on admin. He said AI can cut that load “while preserving the deeply human-led nature of the industry,” and he tied CareMaster to the stretch care teams already feel.

Acquiring CareMaster provides access to 25 years of specialist knowledge in one of the most complex parts of running a care business and an opportunity to deliver better for more care providers. We see first-hand how stretched care teams already are, yet there is still so much time spent on manual work that simply doesn’t need to be there. Having built the industry’s leading care billing software, payments and credit control are what we’re tackling next, but our ambition goes much further.

Will Donnelly, co-founder and chief executive, Lottie

Heading into 2027, Lottie says it wants record commercial growth and a first move abroad. The UK work is unfinished. CareMaster partners still have to migrate. Credit-control AI is a plan, not a live module on the Found pricing page. Council fees still sit £2.36 billion below Care England’s cost of care. The 750 homes on CareMaster will find out, invoice cycle by invoice cycle, whether a 25-year billing brain survives the move onto an AI-native CRM, and whether chasing unpaid care bills is a software problem at all.