How a Care Payroll Firm Collapsed 35 Systems to One

Carer Solutions is a Melbourne-based provider of payroll, compliance, and operational services to the disability and community care sector. They navigate SCHADS Award complexity, plan management, and rostering so their clients don’t have to. Their people are exceptional. Their systems were not. 400,000+ files scattered across SharePoint and OneDrive with no structure 19 levels of nested folders navigated purely by muscle memory An expensive project management tool (Wrike) everyone hated but couldn’t escape 35+ disconnected systems with zero documentation “Everyone sees everything” permission model — no role-based access NDIS audit looming with unknown compliance exposure

Rather than spending 6–12 months cleaning up 400,000 files, we built a completely new digital environment and migrated only what mattered. What we delivered SharePoint Intranet — A central hub with 10 interconnected sites aligned to how they actually work. Staff walked in and started using it immediately — no training backlog, no confusion. Knowledge Management System — Single source of truth for policies, processes, and procedures. Version control and review cadence built in from day one. Compliance Centre — Seven compliance registers (3 active + 4 historical) with full audit trails preserved from legacy systems. Audit-ready immediately. Wrike Decommissioning — Extracted two years of compliance knowledge from tickets. Turned that history into structured FAQs and SOPs. Eliminated the annual licence cost entirely. Salesforce Audit — Analysed 35 licences and identified significant annual savings through licence optimisation. Security Overhaul — From “everyone sees everything” to proper role-based access control with 20 Entra ID security groups. Participant data properly protected. AI compressed the discovery and synthesis layer that normally consumes 6–12 months of consulting. We pointed it at 412,000 files, 1.7M permission grants, and 6,154 Wrike tasks — and got a categorised inventory, PII risk map, and behavioural picture of the organisation back in hours, not weeks. That meant we could build the new SharePoint architecture from their actual operating model — not a generic template — and extract their knowledge management content directly from 151 historical Wrike tickets rather than running months of workshops to draft it from scratch. The specific change: AI provided the domain depth that traditional consulting buys through extensive client interviews. ~35 client meetings replaced the usual 50+, backed by 175 internal sessions doing the synthesis. The client saw polished, fully-furnished deliverables — not drafts, not frameworks needing months of internal implementation. That's why 90% of the investment came back at go-live: staff walked into the new system on day one and used it, with no training backlog or "getting used to it" period eating the benefits.

Real Minds AI ran the engagement as a tight 12-week build rather than a multi-month cleanup. The first three weeks were discovery and assessment: the team mapped all 35-plus disconnected systems and pointed AI at the full estate — roughly 412,000 files, 1.7 million permission grants, and 6,154 Wrike tasks — to produce a categorised content inventory, a PII risk map, and a behavioural picture of how the organisation actually worked. That diagnosis, compressed from the usual six-to-twelve months into hours, let the team design the new environment around Carer Solutions' real operating model instead of a generic template. Weeks four through eight were architecture and build: a ten-site SharePoint intranet, seven compliance registers, and a role-based security model using twenty Entra ID groups. Weeks nine through eleven covered migration and training — moving only the content that mattered, training six teams, decommissioning Wrike, and extracting two years of compliance knowledge from 151 historical tickets into structured FAQs and SOPs. The system went live in week twelve, with staff productive from day one.

Small to medium enterprises drowning in disorganised systems and content