Care home software
Software for care homes, built around the system you already use
A home already has a care planning system, and it is usually the one piece of software in the building that works. The problems are everywhere else: enquiries tracked in an inbox, the rota in a spreadsheet, agency booked by text message, and the compliance evidence in a lever arch file. That is the part worth building, and it is the part nobody sells you.
- Enquiry to admission
- Rota and agency spend
- Evidence with dates on it
The care system is not the software problem
Care planning and medication records are specialist, regulated products with years of clinical development behind them, and the right thing to do with the one you use is keep it. Whichever it is, it stays, and anything we build works alongside it and alongside the people who support it.
What is missing in almost every home we look at is everything that happens outside that system. The enquiry from a family at eleven at night. The rota, and the agency shift booked at seven in the morning because somebody rang in sick. The water temperature checks. The fire door checks. The fee uplift that was agreed in March and invoiced from May. None of that is clinical, all of it decides whether the home is full and whether the evidence exists when somebody asks for it.
The pattern is consistent and it is not a criticism of anyone: those things live in a spreadsheet, an inbox and a folder, because that is what was available when they started and nothing has forced a change since. They work until the home grows, the deputy who held it all in her head leaves, or an inspector asks a question that the folder can only half answer.
How we scope, price and build a first system is set out under custom software development.
Four systems worth building in a home
Ordered by what they are worth. The first one pays for everything else.
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Enquiry to admission
A family enquiry becomes a viewing, an assessment, a decision and an admission, with each stage owned by somebody and nothing sitting for four days because it arrived on a Friday. Occupancy is the whole commercial position of a home, and for most it is tracked in an inbox and a notebook.
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Rota, hours and agency
Who was booked, on what shift, at what rate, and what it cost. Agency is the largest controllable cost in most homes and the least visible one, because the booking happens on the phone at seven in the morning and the invoice arrives three weeks later with nothing to check it against.
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Checks and evidence
Water temperatures, legionella flushing, fire doors, call bells, equipment servicing. Recorded on a phone as the check is done, timestamped, and searchable afterwards. The value is not the checking, which happens anyway. It is that the evidence has a date on it when somebody asks.
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Occupancy and fees
Beds, funder mix, fee uplift dates and what has actually been invoiced against what was agreed. This is normally a spreadsheet one person maintains, and it is the report the owner or the trustees ask for every month.
Proof
Queenswood Care Home
We built the website and the enquiry system for Queenswood, a residential home we work with, and that enquiry route is the first piece of software in an admission pipeline. It captures enough detail for the home to reply with a real answer rather than a brochure request, which is what decides who a family visits.
It is also where the pattern becomes obvious. The enquiry is captured properly and then hands over to an inbox, a diary and somebody’s memory for the four weeks that actually decide whether a bed is filled. That handover is the gap worth closing, and it is the same gap in nearly every home.
Read the Queenswood Care Home case study
Agency spend is where a home leaks money quietly
A shift gets covered at seven in the morning by whoever answers the phone at the agency, at whatever rate is offered, and the decision is made under pressure by somebody whose job that morning is to make sure residents are looked after. That is the right priority and it is exactly why the cost never gets challenged.
What is missing is not discipline. It is a record: which shifts went to agency, which agency, at what rate, how that compares with last month, and which line on the invoice matches which shift. Homes that can see that reliably find the same two or three things, usually one rota gap that recurs every week and one rate that is higher than the others for no reason anybody can now remember.
The system that fixes it is small. It is a booking record, a rate table and one weekly report, and it is a fortnight of work rather than a project.
- Every agency booking recorded at the point it is made
- Invoices checked against shifts rather than approved on trust
- One weekly figure the manager and the owner both see
Buy first. Build only the part that is genuinely yours.
There are good products for rostering, for maintenance logging and for care home accounting, and where one fits, buying it is cheaper and quicker than anything we could build. We will name one and tell you to buy it, which costs us a project and saves you a great deal of money.
A build earns its place in a home in two situations. The first is where the way you work is genuinely your own: a group with a funding mix nothing handles cleanly, or an admissions process built around a relationship with a specific hospital discharge team. The second is the more common one, where four products each do their job, none of them talk to each other, and somebody spends a day a week moving numbers between them.
The honest test is whether you can name the specific thing a product will not do. If you cannot, the problem is usually configuration or adoption, and both are far cheaper to fix than a build.
The arithmetic for deciding between the two is set out in our comparison of off-the-shelf against custom software.
Signs a home has outgrown its spreadsheets
Two or three of these together is usually the point at which building something small starts to pay.
- The occupancy figure the owner sees is compiled by hand, by one person, once a month
- Nobody can say how many enquiries came in last month, or how many became viewings
- The agency invoice is approved without being checked against the shifts it covers
- The rota lives in a spreadsheet that only one person can safely edit
- Evidence for an inspection is assembled over a fortnight rather than printed on the day
- A check was definitely done, and finding the record of it takes twenty minutes
- The same resident details are typed into three places on admission
- A second home has opened and everything above is now happening twice
Start with the enquiry, or with the rota
Those two are where the money is in a home: one fills beds and the other stops the largest controllable cost drifting. Whichever is worse in your home is the right place to start, and one is enough for a first system.
The free review maps it end to end, counts what the current arrangement costs in hours, and gives you a written plan and a fixed quote. You keep both whether you go ahead or not.
Get in touch
Talk to us about software for care homes
A few lines is enough. We will tell you straight whether we can help, what it would cost and how quickly we can be there. No hard sell, and no follow-up sequence if you decide against it.
- We reply within one working day
- A straight answer, including when it is no
- Free process review available, before any money changes hands
Would rather just ring? 01623 354250, Mon–Fri, 9am–5:30pm.
Frequently asked questions
If the answer is not here, ask us. You will get a straight one, from someone who does the work.
Mon–Fri, 9am–5:30pm
Would you build us a care planning system?
Care planning and medication records are specialist regulated products with years of clinical development behind them, and the sensible thing is to keep the one you use. What we build sits around it: admissions, rotas and agency, checks and evidence, occupancy and fees, working alongside the system rather than replacing it.
What sort of software do care homes actually have built?
Four things, in this order of value: an enquiry-to-admission pipeline, a rota with agency bookings and spend recorded against it, a checks and evidence log filled in on a phone as the check happens, and an occupancy and fee report. Each is small on its own, and the first one pays for the rest.
Can it talk to the care planning system we already use?
Usually, and it is worth doing where it removes re-entry on admission. Where a product has no route in, we work to what it can export and import rather than forcing it, and we would rather have one manual step that is honest than an integration held together with hope.
What does a first system cost to build?
A focused first system covering one process end to end typically lands in the low thousands, at a fixed price agreed before work starts. Building all four at once costs far more and is a worse idea, because a system that arrives complete tends not to get adopted by anyone.
Where does resident and staff data sit in something you build?
On UK hosting we manage, with access limited to the roles that need it and an audit trail of who saw what. That is a design requirement in a care setting rather than a feature, and it is the part we scope first because retrofitting access control to a finished system is expensive.
We are one home rather than a group. Is this worth it?
For a single home, start with one thing rather than a platform. An enquiry pipeline or an agency booking record is a fortnight of work and pays for itself on one filled bed or one month of checked invoices. Groups get more from it, but the first system is the same size either way.
