December round up

Icons in the CareHQ application's primary navigation
Icons have been added to the primary navigation

In the final month of 2021 we added CSV and Microsoft Excel exports for reports, introduced icons by popular request and made respite bookings more flexible.

New export options for reports

In addition to being able to export reports as PDF files we've added options for exporting them in CSV and Microsoft Excel (.xsls) format. The additional formats make it simple to work with CareHQ reports in other applications such as Microsoft PowerPoint.

As reports typically include data from several data sources each data source is exported either in a separate CSV file or worksheet within the Microsoft Excel workbook. In the case of CSV exports, as multiple files are generated, a Zip archive is exported containing all files.

Icons for the primary navigation

A number of users have requested we add icons to the primary navigation to help make the links they use most often faster to locate with the UI and so this month we did just that.

Other updates & fixes

  • When adding a booking you can now specify if the booking is respite or permanent. Previously any booking 12 weeks or less was considered respite and anything over was considered permanent. The new approach provides a number of advantages:
    • A service user can now be booked in for respite without an end date for the booking which may not initially be known. Despite there being no end date the occupancy report will still report the bookings as respite, whereas previously they were reported as permanent.
    • If a service user who was booked in for respite remains at the location for more than 12 weeks we'll automatically convert the booking to a permanent booking as before, however, we now take into account multiple consecutive bookings when determining the length of the service user's stay which prevents incorrect reporting of respite for scenarios such as short term room moves or rate changes.
    • When we convert a respite booking to permanent we record this action which will allow us in future to report on the number of service users that transition from respite to permanent.
  • We made a number of changes to the occupancy report based on feedback, including:
    • providing information on billed (service user and block contracts) vs occupied (service user only) rooms,
    • allowing the graph to show billed rooms over time as either a percentage or physical count,
    • and excluding Out of service rooms when calculating billed and occupancy percentages.
  • It's now possible to view past dates when using the service user expense balances overview, previously the overview only showed balances for the current date (this remains the default).
  • Inactive service users with a non-zero balance that have been active in the last 12 months are now included in the service user balances overview.
  • The room list page has been updated to show service user / block contract rates for each room.
  • When adding or updating a booking a link to the associated service user is now displayed, previously only a link back to the room was presented.
  • It's now possible to export up to 500 PDFs at a time (for example monthly invoices for a location).
  • Rooms with block contracts can now be selected when moving a service user to another available room.
  • Resolved issue with updating invoice line items in some scenarios where changes to the description would not be saved.
  • It's now possible to add line items to consolidated invoices that don't have an associated service user.
  • Resolved issue where discharging a user using the discharge shortcut would generate an error.