How Much Does CQC Audit Software Cost for a UK Care Home?

CQC audit software for a UK care home typically costs £8 to £24 per user per month, plus VAT. The bill follows how many people complete audits, not how many beds or homes you run. Setup, templates, and training sit outside the subscription. Whether it pays back depends on what your current paper process costs in manager hours.

CQC does not supply or approve audit software. Care providers use third-party tools to manage internal audits, record evidence, track corrective actions, and monitor quality between inspections. Whether the subscription is worth the cost depends on how much staff time the current audit process consumes and how easily the home can produce evidence of good governance.

How Much Does CQC Audit Software Cost for a Single Care Home?

A single care home with a small audit team usually spends a few hundred dollars a year, because only the people running audits need a paid licence. CQC audit software is a system a care provider uses to run its own internal audits and hold the evidence. CQC itself does not approve or supply software, and its provider portal handles registration and notifications.

GoAudits publishes its rates.

Care setting	Plan	Published rate	Annual cost
One home, 3 people auditing	Starter	£8 per user per month	£288
One home wanting scheduled audits, 5 users	Enterprise	£24 per user per month	£1440
Care group, 25 users across 10 homes	Enterprise	£24 per user per month	£7200

Annual billing, VAT added. Starter covers mobile audits, instant reports, offline use, and action plans, which suits a single home. Enterprise adds audit scheduling, roles and permissions, and advanced reporting, which a care group needs once several managers audit at once. Annual billing saves 20%, and larger care groups can agree custom pricing. See the GoAudits pricing plans.

Is Care Home Audit Software Priced Per User, Per Bed or Per Home?

Per user per month is the standard model, so cost scales with the number of auditors rather than the number of residents. Per-bed and per-home pricing is more common in care management systems. On GoAudits, staff who only close assigned actions do not take a paid licence so that a deputy can act on findings at no extra cost.

What Does a Mock CQC Inspection Cost by Comparison?

UK care consultancies publish list prices from around £595 for a remote readiness review to roughly £2,000 for a two-day on-site audit of one care home, plus VAT. That is a one-off cost per home, per visit.

A consultant gives a care home an outside opinion once. Mock CQC inspections run internally give the home a cycle it owns and repeats. Many practitioners dislike the term, since only an inspector inspects.

What Does Running Care Home Audits on Paper Cost in Staff Time?

The cost of paper audits sits in the repetition, not in the audit itself. A paper audit is completed by hand, typed up, turned into an action plan, then copied onto the service improvement plan. The same findings get rewritten four times before anyone acts on them.

Smeaton Healthcare, a home care provider in Devon and Cornwall, scanned and uploaded monthly paper audits, then analysed them by hand, which took weeks and several staff. The provider now reports saving 8 hours a week per branch office.

To cost your own, multiply audits per month by the minutes those four steps take, then by an hourly rate. The National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour from April 2026, and a registered manager’s hour costs considerably more.

Why Don’t Free Tools Like Google Forms Work for CQC Audits?

Free form tools capture answers but do not close the loop on findings. Google Forms and Microsoft Forms carry no action owner, no due date, no evidence of closure, and no trend analysis unless someone builds it by hand.

Regulation 17 expects providers to run systems that assess, monitor, and improve quality, and to keep records of audits and action plans. A folder of form responses is not that system. Purpose-built care home audit templates carry that structure.

Can Spreadsheets Manage CQC Compliance Across Several Care Homes?

A spreadsheet works for one care home with one person maintaining it, and breaks once several managers keep their own versions. Each home adds its own columns, the master file goes stale, and nobody can say which audits are overdue.

What Costs Come After the Subscription?

Budget for template setup, staff training, and moving historic records. These are one-off costs, and the template line is usually smaller than expected.

GoAudits digitises a care home’s existing paper checklists and offers more than 40 care templates built with UK care compliance experts. Audits run on phones and tablets staff already carry.

How Do You Justify Audit Software to an Owner or Finance Director?

Build the case on manager hours recovered and on how fast the home produces evidence, rather than on avoiding a poor rating. No system prevents a poor rating, and a finance director will discount that argument.

Three arguments hold up:

• Manager hours recovered each month, costed at a real hourly rate
• Audits completed on time, which is what Regulation 17 asks a provider to evidence
• Governance reports produced on request, since CQC can require a written report on quality and safety within 28 days

Be straight about one point: paper is not a breach. CQC accepts paper and electronic records, provided they are accurate, complete, and held securely. The question is whether the current system produces evidence quickly enough between inspections. Six months in, measure audits completed on time, actions closed by their due date, and findings that keep recurring.

GoAudits runs a 14-day free trial and a 60-day money-back guarantee, which answers an owner who wants the spend reversible.

How Does GoAudits Help Care Providers Budget for Audit Software?

GoAudits care home auditing software charges per user per month on published rates, so a care provider can cost a rollout before speaking to anyone. It suits single homes and groups that want the same audits running everywhere.

Careville, a UK nursing and care provider, cut compliance reports from close to half a day to about 10 minutes after moving self-audits off paper.

Price CQC audit software against what your current audit process already costs in manager hours, and the answer usually becomes obvious.