March round up

Care home resident billing setup showing linked contracts.
Contracts that are linked and contribute to other contracts are highlighted by a teal link icon.

Another month and another significant feature released for billing teams with the introduction of linked contracts. We also published a new C# SDK for the CareHQ API as well as a number of smaller improvements and bug fixes.

Introducing linked contracts

CareHQ now allows you to link one or more contracts to a parent contract so that part of the parent contract's fee is cover by the contracts linked to it. For example, you may have a contract and fee in place with the local authority that is part covered by a private contribution and potentially an FNC contribution.

By way of example let's assume the following:

  • We have a contract in place with the local authority (LA) at £1,000 per week.
  • We have a contract in place with the resident who contributes £100 per week towards the LA fee.
  • We have an FNC contract in place that contributes £235.88 per week towards the LA fee.

This means the local authority (LA) will be charged £664.12 per week whilst the contributing private and FNC contracts remain in place (e.g. £1,000 - £100 - £235.88 = £664.12).

There are a number of reasons why you might choose to link these contracts rather than simply run them separately;

  • If you have agreed a rate increase with the LA, for example 5% then the rate increase should apply to the full contract fee of £1,000 not the actual rate the LA pays. However, without a way to record a full contract fee this could easily be overlooked causing the increase to be smaller than it should be.
  • There may be times when one of the contributing contracts is not applicable, for example FNC would not be applicable for a period where the resident is in hospital. With a linked contract, when FNC is not contributing to the rate paid the LA will be charged additional during this period to ensure the parent contract's fee is met (e.g. £1,000 per week). If the contracts are not linked then during the same period the fee for the resident would drop to £764.12 per week, which if overlooked could result in lost revenue.
  • When we generate an invoice for a parent contract with linked contracts we show the contribution of each linked contract so the recipient of the invoice can clearly see all contributions made. This can be especially useful with private bill payers receiving FNC contributions where not seeing the FNC contribution shown in the invoice can lead to concern and additional queries.

For the most part linked contracts work the same as any other contract, there's no restriction on their billing schedules (e.g. they don't have to be billed on the same schedule as the contract they are contributing to). Any contract can be linked to another contract provided:

  • The contract dates overlap.
  • The total contributions don't exceed that of the parent contract fee.

Further features such as making historical rate adjustments, credit note generation and raising outstanding invoices all work with linked contracts and will automatically generate the required credit notes and/or invoices.

C# SDK now available for CareHQ's API

This month we released a C# SDK for CareHQ's API. C# (pronounced C Sharp) is a free Open Source and cross-platform language developed by Microsoft and supported by the .NET platform. It's a popular language for web development and writing integrations with other Microsoft services and applications.

As well as helping clients and partners using C# to integrate with CareHQ, this update also ties into our plans to offer support for other Microsoft services and platforms including Single Sign-On (SSO), Outlook and Calendar.

Other updates & fixes

  • Direct debit notifications can now be disabled for setup and advance notices. This can be useful when for example notifications are handled by the payment service provider.
  • Real-time email validation is now applied to fields that support multiple email addresses.
  • We now support tracking multiple care funds against a resident.
  • The room chart UI has been updated to handle longer room names.
  • You can now click on the Due amount on the credit allocation screen to auto-populate the related credit amount field.
  • Reminders for expired documents are now generated for documents that are associated with a care enquiry not just those associated with a resident.
  • Fixed issue where using the When filter field when viewing billing contracts for a billing schedule would result in an error page.
  • Update booking rates now handles residents in rooms with no target rate specified for their recorded care needs.
  • CareHQ PHP SDK updated to be compatible with PHP8.
  • Fixed issue where in some scenarios making a contract rate adjustment would correctly apply the adjustment but would incorrectly redirect the user and generate an error.
  • Merging location contacts no longer fails if a contact has no associated billing rulesets or schedules.
  • Fixed issue where contracts generated by rate adjustments were not assigned a contract type and therefore could not generate invoices.
  • Fixed issue where duplicate draft credit notes would be raised in some scenarios when discharging a resident.