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Home care services · FranceFinally knowing who still owes you what.
You sell hours. You get paid for them in pieces: the county council (département) by one bulk transfer, the care recipient by direct debit or cheque, the CESU clearing house (which cashes pre-funded service vouchers) in batches, the Urssaf (the social contributions agency) for half of it through the instant tax credit. Every month, someone on your team rebuilds the puzzle in a spreadsheet. This page describes what AI agents can take over, and what they leave to you: the decision.
This page describes the system we propose, not a completed engagement. The worked example is fictional.
One billed hour, four payers, one spreadsheet.
The county council (département)
APA and PCH, the French care allowances for older and disabled people, usually paid straight to the service. One transfer a month for hundreds of beneficiaries, one remittance advice (bordereau) to detail it, one format per département, paid one to three months after the service.
The care recipient, or someone on their behalf
Their co-payment and the rate shortfall, by direct debit, cheque or a transfer with a vague reference. Sometimes from a daughter’s account, a guardian’s, a notary’s.
The CESU clearing house (CRCESU)
One transfer per batch of vouchers, for several recipients at once, net of issuer fees, deposit fees and rejected vouchers. The amount received matches no invoice.
The Urssaf, pension funds, assistance companies
The instant tax-credit advance for recipients outside APA and PCH, the pension funds’ care plans, one-off assignments from assistance companies. Each with its own portal, rhythm and file format.
The amount received is almost never the amount expected: an hour rejected by the visit-tracking system, a retroactive rate adjustment, an overpayment clawed back, a February correction buried in the May transfer. Until the puzzle is rebuilt:
- You chase an 88-year-old who has already paid. That is the mistake nobody forgives.
- You forget to claim €20 from the council, a hundred times, until the claim is time-barred.
- Customer ledgers are unreconciled, closing drags on, provisions are guesswork.
- Cash is managed blind on your largest receipt line.
Twenty euros, somewhere in 183 lines.
A care recipient at dependency level GIR 2, 40 hours a month. The service charges €28 an hour, the council’s rate is 25. A 20% co-payment, for the sake of clarity. In March, 38 hours delivered, 37 validated: one clock-in was missed.
| Line | Calculation | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Service invoice (March) | 38 hrs × €28.00 | €1,064.00 |
| … of which expected from the council | 38 hrs × €25.00 × 80% | €760.00 |
| … of which expected from the recipient | co-payment €190.00 + rate shortfall €114.00 | €304.00 |
| Received from the council | 37 validated hrs × €25.00 × 80%, inside a bulk transfer of 183 lines | €740.00 |
| Gap on the council side | 1 hr rejected by visit tracking | −€20.00 |
| Received from the recipient | SEPA direct debit | €304.00 |
That €20 is neither a bank error nor an unpaid bill. It is a rejected hour. You have to find it among 183 lines, understand that it is a rejection and not a rate cap, then choose: claim it from the council with the proof of visit, re-bill it if the contract allows and the service is not at fault, or write it off. Multiply by your recipients, your branches and your payment channels: that is someone’s whole month.
Fictional example. Rates, co-payment and volumes are chosen for readability. They describe neither an existing département nor an existing service, nor an achieved result.
It reads what you already have. It writes nowhere.
The system reads what already exists on your side. It creates no invoice and posts no entry. It rebuilds the matching and explains it. Then it prepares what follows: the claim, the reminder, the proposed entry.
What it reads
- Bank statements
- Council remittance advices
- Core software: invoices, care plans, hours
- Accounting
- County council portals, including Domatel (optional)
Matching
- Agents read the documents
- Rules compute and match
- A manager settles the ambiguous cases
What it produces
- Customer accounts substantiated line by line
- Substantiated claims to county councils
- Reminders drafted for care recipients
- Ageing balance, delays, gaps per département
Our agents can already read Domatel, the visit-tracking and billing platform used by many French départements. They read payment reports and remittance advices there, read-only, with the service’s authorisation.
Agents that prepare, rules that compute, a person who decides.
AI stays at the periphery. It reads the documents, explains a gap, drafts a letter. The number comes out of a rule, and the decision out of a person.
- 01
Read the remittance advices, whatever the format
PDF, spreadsheet, portal page: an agent pulls out the line-by-line detail. Then we do the sums: the lines must add up to the advice total, and the total must match the transfer. If they do not, the document goes in front of someone.
- 02
Rebuild the puzzle
A matching engine, deterministic and replayable, links the transfer to its remittance advice, then each line to the right person’s invoices for the right period. It compares against what that payer owed, not the total invoiced. A council paying less than the invoice is normal. What matters is the gap that remains once what it owed is deducted.
- 03
Name every gap
Rate cap, floor rate applied late, rejected hour, co-payment revised after the fact, overpayment withheld, hospital stay, death. On the recipient side: bounced direct debit, payment by a third party, partial voucher batch. Every gap gets a name, and the name says what to do. Many can be seen coming before the invoice even goes out.
- 04
Explain, then let someone rule
Clear-cut cases match themselves. The others land in front of a manager, ranked by amount, with a readable explanation: which transfer, which advice, which invoice, which gap, which likely cause. They confirm or correct. The system remembers the payer’s alias and the council’s habits.
- 05
A claim is not a reminder
To the council, you claim, documents attached. To a family, you write, with care. A late voucher batch is followed up without chasing anyone: the clearing house will pay. Letters go out in the service’s name, signed by your team, under a scenario you have approved. Arpaia collects nothing on your behalf.
- 06
Fetch the missing remittance advice
When a council sends nothing, an agent can read the portal for you, read-only, with a dedicated account, within the portal’s rules. We already do this with Domatel. If the portal forbids it, we ask for the document. This module stays optional: the foundation is the remittance advices you receive and the bank.
- 07
See what the spreadsheet could not show
Ageing balance by payer, branch and legal entity. Each council’s real payment delay, predictable once observed. Rate-cap ratio, rejected hours, rate shortfalls never re-billed. And every year, the tax-credit certificates (attestations fiscales) computed on what was actually collected.
The right debtor, the right tone, the right channel.
Your private debtors are 85, or they are their children, their guardians, their estates. The risk is not only the unpaid bill: it is hurting the person a care worker visits every morning. Every payer record therefore carries a status, and that status decides who receives what, in what tone, and how far it goes.
Death
No more reminders from the moment the information is recorded, whatever its source. The receivable moves to an estate file, with its own deadlines.
Guardianship (tutelle, curatelle)
Under tutelle or curatelle renforcée, the stronger forms of adult protection, letters go to the guardian. Under curatelle simple, to the recipient, and the guardian is informed as the court order provides. The tone is administrative.
Family payer
We write to the family carer if the recipient or their legal representative has designated them in writing. Otherwise to the recipient. The system remembers who pays for whom. It does not guess.
Over-indebtedness
As soon as the debt-relief application is ruled admissible, older receivables are frozen and no longer collected. Later services remain due.
Limitation period
Two years, counted from the service date, not the invoice date. The system warns before the deadline and starts with the oldest stock.
The reminder scenario is yours: a reminder that mentions the tax credit, a call from the branch, logged as a task, a firm letter, then, if you so decide, the steps suited to the amount. Every step is logged. No reminder fees are charged to the recipient, as French law requires, and the consumer mediator’s details appear in the letters.
No second source of truth.
The core software remains the system of record for invoices and hours. Accounting remains the system of record for entries. The system stands between the two and replaces neither.
| Data | System of record | The system… |
|---|---|---|
| Invoices and credit notes | Your core software | reads them, never creates them, sends back correction requests |
| Accounting entries | Your accounting | proposes matching and adjustment entries, posts nothing on its own |
| Care plans and hours | Core software and council | reads them |
| Payment status, matching, gaps | The system | is the source of truth, substantiated line by line |
What the system does not do
- No invoicing.
- No accounting entry posted on its own.
- No action on a portal, only reading.
- No reminder without a scenario you approved, and none to a recipient without your team’s validation.
- No amount decided by an AI.
- No scoring of people. The only score measures how well a payment matches an invoice. The escalation of reminders follows the amount, the age and the status of the file, not a prediction about the person.
- No reminder or handling fees charged to the recipient.
Health data, a demanding framework.
- Disability is health data, and dependency level deserves the same care. The system follows the French data protection authority (CNIL) framework for social and medico-social support. The impact assessment is done with your data protection officer, before going live.
- It is designed to run with a certified health data host (HDS), as French public health law requires for this data.
- Documents containing personal data are read inside that environment. External language models only see pseudonymised data, with no name and no direct identifier. They are chosen with your data protection officer.
- Arpaia acts as a processor under article 28 of the GDPR. Model providers are sub-processors, subject to your written consent, hosted in the European Union, under contracts that exclude training on your data.
- Every decision, automatic or human, is logged with its criteria. A statutory auditor can reconstruct why a given transfer settled a given invoice. Closed periods are frozen. Everything can be exported.
- Writing off a receivable or requesting a credit note goes through an approval flow: the branch proposes, head office approves above a threshold you set.
With your tools, not instead of them.
- Whatever the core software, through exports or an API.
- Several banks, several legal entities, several branches, from day one.
- In-house or outsourced accounting: proposed entries come out in your format.
- From one département to more than a hundred. A remittance format is learned only once.
- Provider mode (prestataire). Mandataire mode, where the service acts as the household’s agent and only management fees are at stake, comes later.
Measure before setting a target.
The first deliverable is a measurement of the current state on the pilot scope. Targets are set with you, on these indicators:
- Share of receipts matched without intervention
- Time between a transfer and its matching
- Amount of council gaps detected and claimed
- Age of recipient receivables at first reminder
- Person-days spent on matching each month
- Unexplained gaps at month end
A bounded pilot, then the extension.
We start with an assessment of a few weeks: your entities, your banks, your tools, the remittance formats you receive, the stock of unmatched items and old unpaid bills, some of them close to being time-barred. Taking on that backlog is a project in itself, separate from the monthly flow.
The pilot covers a few départements and a few branches. Remittance advices are supplied by hand, matching is proposed then validated by your finance team, claims and reminders are prepared but sent by you. Extension to other départements, pension funds and portals comes next, based on results.
The assessment falls under our Consulting service, the pilot under Delivery. This case concerns French home care services and personal services organisations in provider mode, whatever their core software.