After Two EWAs Failed, Here's Why Lionstone Picked Tapcheck

Lionstone Healthcare knows the challenges of staffing well. The company manages approximately 40 nursing homes across multiple states, with CNAs and frontline caregivers at the center of everything they do. Their mission: enhance every aspect of resident care through effective leadership and operational excellence. Keeping that workforce stable is not only an HR goal but also a care quality issue: keeping caregivers engaged and on-task allows them to focus on the needs of the seniors in their care.

As competition for caregivers intensified, Lionstone's Corporate Payroll Supervisor Barbara Bowers watched a familiar pattern emerge. Candidates were passing on job offers at facilities that didn't offer on-demand pay. Earned wage access had stopped being a nice-to-have. It had become a table-stakes expectation.

Getting there, though, took two failed attempts first.

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Two providers. Two pivots.

Lionstone's first earned wage access program required the company to front wages before reimbursement. That created real cash-flow pressure. Worse, advances were calculated against gross wages instead of net wages, which meant employees could draw more than they'd actually take home after taxes and deductions. When reconciliation time came, the numbers wouldn't balance, and the payroll team was left chasing back overpayments. The program was shut down.

Their second attempt came through a built-in feature from a payroll provider. This one had a different problem: both the employer and the employee were charged fees on every transaction. Deductions were distributed in small, inconsistent increments rather than a single clean pull. The payroll team couldn't map what came out to what was owed. The numbers never matched. That program was shut down too.

Two providers. Two problems. And 4,300 employees still without access to the benefit they needed.

What Tapcheck did differently

When Tapcheck approached Lionstone, Barbara's reaction was immediate. The model just made sense.

No fronting required. Tapcheck funds earned wage advances itself and recovers the amount through a single ACH deduction tied to payroll. No cash-flow risk. No chasing reimbursements.

Net wage calculations. Advances are capped at actual take-home pay after deductions. That eliminates overpayment risk entirely and keeps reconciliation clean from the start.

Scales with growth. Adding a new nursing home to the program takes a simple file with core information like employee ID and deduction code. New locations are ready to run from day one of payroll.

For a company managing 50 locations with 4,300 employees and over $6 million in monthly payroll, these aren't minor conveniences. They're the difference between a program that runs and one that creates more work than it solves.

What it means on the floor

The results show up in the numbers. 82% of Lionstone's active Tapcheck users log in at least once per month. That level of engagement signals that employees aren't just signing up and forgetting about the benefit. They're relying on it.

For Barbara, the real-world impact is straightforward.

"From a CNA level, a kid gets sick, they need to go get a prescription. This is a great way to get the money to do it. It's so much better than using a check cashing place or a payday lender."

That's the core of what earned wage access is supposed to do. Not replace a paycheck. Not function like a loan. Just give people access to money they've already earned, when a real-life moment demands it.

Active Tapcheck users at Lionstone showed a 31% boost in retention compared to non-users. In an industry where turnover runs at 50% or higher, and where replacing a single CNA can cost thousands of dollars in recruiting and onboarding, that number has real operational weight.

The payroll perspective

For payroll teams, EWA programs often sound great in theory and create headaches in practice. Lionstone's experience before Tapcheck is a familiar story: vendor solutions that don't account for net wages, deductions that arrive in fragments, and hours spent trying to reconcile lines that won't add up.

Barbara's summary of what changed: "You can see on the back end exactly how it's paid. It's very easy to use, and the employees are getting charged very little for it. It's very convenient for them."

She's already recommended Tapcheck to other operators in the industry.

The broader picture

The long-term care workforce is facing a genuine staffing crisis. CNAs make up roughly a third of the nursing home workforce and provide up to 90% of direct resident care. Facilities with lower turnover consistently show better health outcomes, higher quality ratings, and fewer care citations.

Earned wage access alone won't solve the staffing shortage in skilled nursing. But for frontline caregivers living paycheck to paycheck, access to earned wages when they need them reduces financial stress, builds loyalty, and gives employers a meaningful edge in a competitive market.

For Lionstone, it took two tries to find the version that actually worked. With Tapcheck, they found one that does.