May round up

In May we introduced support for invoicing residents for their expenses through CareHQ, and a new report to simplify ARC concessionary TV licence submissions, along with a host of other improvements and fixes based on your feedback.

Automatic invoicing for resident expenses

You can now raise monthly invoices for the outstanding balance of a resident's expenses. Care homes vary in how they manage payment for resident expenses; some homes request top-up when a resident's balance is getting low, whilst other homes simply invoice for the outstanding balance each month.

No matter which approach you take, CareHQ provides features to help you manage the resident balances. If you request top-ups to the balance then CareHQ can send low balance alerts to relevant parties along with an attached statement, or if you bill for the outstanding balance each month then CareHQ now allows you to raise itemised invoices for all residents at a care home.

How monthly invoicing of expenses works

A week before the invoice date you've assigned for the care home, an action will be automatically created and assigned to the relevant person at the home asking them to review and sign off resident balances by the invoicing date.

Once they are happy all expenses are up to date they can mark the expenses as ready to bill for the period. This will trigger an email notification to the person(s) responsible for raising the invoices.

To generate invoices for outstanding resident expense balances we provide a dedicated interface allowing users to select the residents they want to raise invoices for (typically all of them). Once the selection has been made you simply select the Generate invoices action and all the invoices will be automatically raised for you.

ARC concessionary TV licence report

We've also added a new report this month to simplify ARC TV licence submissions. The new report provides all the information needed for each room and the residents within them for an ARC TV licence submission. You can access the report under Reports > Service users / Residents > TV (ARC) licence.

Other updates & fixes

• Billing rulesets can now be configured to bill for care on a per day or per night basis.
• A new article has been added to the knowledge base explaining how to use proposed checkout dates for rolling respite.
• A new article has been added to the knowledge base explaining how to configure billing rulesets.

• Home visits can now be assigned to other contacts not only the initial care seeker.
• Added a resident status summary to the top of the view resident page which includes a shortcut to book a resident in if they are pending admission with no admission date set.
• An FAO (For the Attention Of) field is now available when setting up billing for a resident.
• The aged debt reports can now show aged debt by issue date or due date (previously aged debt was always shown by issue date).
• IP ranges can now be specified when restricting access to the CareHQ application and API using the CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) format.
• The *ContactName column for Xero invoice exports can now be customised, allowing providers to match CareHQ's output with any existing contact name format they have used.
• Automated actions for billing discrepancies can now be temporarily disabled while clients transition to invoicing on CareHQ, reducing disruption for users while billing information is uploaded for each home.

• The negative days count of balances for past residents is now correct on the resident balances report (previously the number of days was always shown as 0).
• Fixed issue where updating a credit entry to a debit within the expense ledger would result in no change and the entry remaining a credit.
• Duplicate actions to arrange an assessment are no longer generated if more than one home visit is booked and completed.
• When setting a day of the month for a billing schedule that is monthly in advance, the day now correctly applies to the previous month not the current month.
• The move room helper now looks up available rooms in real time based on the move date. Previously the suggested rooms were based on the current date, which could mean the helper could make room suggestions that it would then reject as not being available.