July round-up

July's focus was on billing, with a host of improvements made based on feedback from clients as well as the introduction of care fund tracking.

Tracking resident care funds

This month we added support for tracking care funds for residents, making it simple to keep track of when funds will be depleted and ensuring you have enough notice to address the issue of future funding.

You can now create one or more care funds against a resident by stating an opening balance and date for each fund. If you're not currently using the CareHQ billing engine then the fund's current balance and depletion date will be based on the resident's booking rate. However, if you are using the billing engine then billing contracts can be assigned a care fund they are paid from, giving the most accurate forecasting for funds.

When the government introduces the £86,000 cap on personal care costs in October 2023, tracking care fees will be an essential feature for any billing software. CareHQ's billing engine addresses this change in legislation by allowing care and room fees to be separated within billing contracts and care fees to be tracked separately against the cap/fund.

Other updates & fixes

• When a care enquiry closes due to a failed assessment, the reason for closing is now set as Failed assessment. Previously it would have been set to Service not suitable.
• Billing discrepancy reporting has been improved. CareHQ now flags future as well as current billing discrepancies. Multiple discrepancies can now be flagged against a service user and additional details, including the date of the discrepancy, make it easier to resolve them.
• Multiple billing contracts for the same billing party can now run concurrently against the same service user.
• Care enquiries can now be searched by phone number (mobile or landline) and email.
• Service user listings can now be filtered by duration of stay (respite or permanent).
• The location performance report will use billing contracts (including the days after death rule), if invoicing is enabled, to generate more accurate revenue figures.
• Figures within the closed reason report now link to the list of care enquiries they relate to.
• Rooms are now ordered by name and not daily/weekly rate when using the room availability checker.
• Billing contracts under the service user billing tab are now ordered by start date, descending.
• The app usage report has been optimised so that reviewing data for long periods (1+ years) takes significantly less time (seconds).
• Our support team can now temporarily view CareHQ as another user to allow us to track down hard to reproduce user-specific issues faster.
• Read endpoints for bookings have now been added to the API.

• Whitelisted file uploads with .doc extension (previously files with a .doc extension were rejected on upload).
• Days after death rule for billing is now applied to invoices where the service user is flagged as deceased.
• Home visit reminders (SMS) are now always sent to care seekers (where a mobile number is available).
• Automated review actions created whenever a care enquiry is open and has no next action are now visible to regional managers as well as the user they are assigned to.
• Pop-up menus for service user and location contacts now appear for regional managers.
• Fix for breadcrumb links on service user contact billing setup and remove pages.
• Fixed styling of reports list on narrow (mobile) devices.
• & no longer appears in group drop-downs when an ampersand is present in the group name.