Domiciliary care software for the hours between calls

The care itself is rarely the problem. Hours disappear around it: rebuilding the rota when a carer goes off sick, ringing round for cover, answering families who want to know when someone is coming, and matching the council invoice against calls that ran short or late.

What we do not build is a second care record. Care plans, MAR charts and call monitoring belong in a recognised digital social care record, and there are several good ones. We build around it, and where it offers an API we read from it or write to it. How that works is set out under API integration services.

In most agencies the rota is one person's job and a large part of their week. A new package, a hospital admission, a carer who rings in sick: each change ripples through three runs. A board built for your agency knows your rules. How many calls a run can hold, which carers a client has met before, who drives and who does not, which calls are double-ups and which clients need the same carer at the same time each day.

Travel time is the rule that costs most when it is missing. Under the National Minimum Wage rules, time spent travelling between appointments counts as working time; the commute from home to the first call does not. A rota that leaves no gap between two calls six miles apart either makes the carer late or leaves them paid below the minimum for the hour. The board treats the drive as part of the shift. If you are weighing a spreadsheet against software for this, read Excel scheduling or planning software; how we build rotas in general is under staff scheduling software.

A care worker has a phone in one hand and a pair of gloves in the other. An app for the run should ask for very little: where next, what this call is for, who was here last and a button to say it is done. It keeps working with no signal and sends everything once the phone is back in range. It does not need to be in an app store; a web app saved to the home screen, a progressive web app, is usually enough.

Check-in and check-out are what the council reads, so they end up in your call monitoring system, sent from our app through an integration or logged in the system's own app and shown beside the run. Electronic call monitoring is not a single national rule; councils write it into their framework contracts, and many now ask for alerts on late or missed calls. With the check-in beside the run, a coordinator sees a late call before the family does.

Council-funded packages are paid on delivered time, and the gap between what was commissioned and what was delivered is where invoices get queried. A call that ran fifteen minutes short, a cancelled call that was never logged, a double-up where only one carer checked in. The care record holds each of those facts; what is often missing is the view across them before the invoice goes out.

We build that view per client, without clinical content. Families get a separate link that shows only when the next call is due and who is coming. Anything more personal, such as a review summary to sign, belongs in a client portal with two-factor authentication, not in an email thread.

After a run of fifteen calls nobody wants to type fifteen notes. Speaking them in the car is quicker, but a voice memo is not a record. AI can turn a few spoken lines into a draft in the shape your care record expects: what was done, what was noticed, what the next carer needs to know. The carer reads it and approves it. The AI makes no care decisions, suggests no treatment and writes nothing to the record on its own.

With health data we build it on a model that runs in the UK or EU, under a data processing agreement, with no retention for training. Why a general chatbot is not enough for this is covered in is ChatGPT safe for business.

An agency grows as fast as it can recruit. The care worker thinking of moving from a care home looks at local jobs on their phone in the evening, and an application form that wants a CV upload loses most of them. We build the vacancy on your own site with three questions: name and number, whether they hold a full UK driving licence, and whether they prefer mornings, evenings or weekends. It states plainly that travel time between calls is paid. What you show the people who might work for you is employer branding.

The same site has a second reader: the son or daughter looking for care for a parent after a hospital discharge. They search by town, so a page per area you cover and a Google Business Profile with the right category do more than a slogan, as set out under local SEO. We build that website from 1,500 euros.

A registered manager running a small agency does not need an enterprise system or a planning board. An agency with fifty carers across three towns needs more than a shared calendar. Here is what we would build beside your care record at each size.

What drives the cost of a project like this is set out in custom software development cost, and you can try your own figures in the software development cost calculator.

Home care in England sits under several regulators and contracts at once. These are the rules that most often have to be built into the software, read at the source on 31 October 2026.

The software decides nothing about care and certifies nothing. It makes sure the rule is in front of you at the moment it matters. Where UK GDPR and EU GDPR differ, see UK GDPR vs EU GDPR.

That is 330 minutes a week, five and a half hours of a coordinator's time. Home care does not stop for the holidays, so across 52 weeks it comes to 286 hours. Whether those hours go into supervision, an extra package or a coordinator who leaves on time is your call.

We have no home care agency as a client yet, but for DA Logistics we built a weekly planning board that resolves its own conflicts and an app where drivers send leave requests and reports in three languages.

Other care and practice work has its own page: software for physiotherapists and software for veterinary practices, and for early years settings, software for nurseries.