May & June round up

Screenshot of CareHQ's retrospective bookings report
The retrospective bookings report makes it easy to identify changes to bookings that have been made after they happened.

May and June saw the release of a new report to help identify bookings which were added or updated after the event, the introduction of snapshots for both the Aged debt by service user and Fees summary reports, and another significant set of improvements and fixes based on feedback from our users.

Retrospective bookings report

A new report to find bookings that have been added or updated retrospectively. The report helps finance teams identify bookings where the start or end date has been set as a date prior to the date on which the booking was changed, potentially leading to gaps in billing.  Once identified, the booking and associated billing can be checked and the reason for the retrospective change investigated with the user who made it.

Other updates & fixes

  • Snapshot support has now been extended to both the Aged debt by service user report and the Fees summary report. The next report to gain snapshot support will be the occupancy report.
  • Billing schedules can now be exported in CSV or Excel format.
  • Billing rulesets can now be exported in CSV or Excel format.
  • The application change log report can now be exported in CSV or Excel format.
  • CareHQ now supports exporting Direct Debit transactions for Natwest Autopay.
  • We now show the status of the service user an invoice relates to in the draft listing for invoices.
  • Location name has been added as a column to the Residents sheet in the Aged debt by service user export.
  • Improved the performance of snapshot reports, specifically addressing slow load times for clients with 50+ homes.
  • IPv6 addresses are now supported when specifying the allowed IP ranges for API keys and the CareHQ app.
  • Added support for setting the number of days before the issue date of an invoice at which CareHQ should send the invoice to recipients (only applicable if automatic sending of invoices is enabled for your account).
  • Contract adjustments (via Make adjustment, End contract and Cancel contract) now check for draft invoices related to the contract being adjusted and prevent adjustments in a period covered by a draft invoice. Previously CareHQ would not generate credit notes for draft invoices which could lead to overbilling if the draft invoice was later approved. The overbilling would be flagged by the billing review report, however, this prevents the issue presenting in the first place.
  • The period of care covered by an invoice or a credit note is now shown in statements (including Excel and CSV exports).
  • Receipts can now be filtered by company and by posted date or received date (previously they could only be filtered by posted date).
  • Required documents for day care are now only required when a day care service user has a current or pending booking. Previously required documents for day care service users were required if the service user was active. However, documents may often be required per day care session (and expire after that session) and so the new approach ensures missing documents are not miss reported if the service user remains active but does not currently have a future day care session booked.
  • Added option to extend a contract that has ended. Selecting to extend places the user in the add contract screen with all the details from the existing contract copied over and the start date set to the day after the existing contract ended. This can be especially useful when extending a contract covering rolling respite.
  • When adding a new billing contract for a resident, if they are currently a respite resident (or will be) with a proposed checkout date, the contract will now show the proposed checkout date against the start / end date fields within the form.
  • A note is now set against a receipt's change log when a return is recorded for the receipt.
  • Receipts generated when auto-reconciling Direct Debit transactions can now be unreconciled and manually re-reconciled.
  • A default reference can now be set for service user expense invoices when setting the billing party responsible for expenses.
  • The average stay report has been updated to support a more flexible dataset. It's now possible to:
    • Use past, current or all resident data in the report.
    • Tally the stays by continuous booking or by service user.
    • Determine the average for respite and permanent combined (previously these were always reported on separately.)
  • Room number and floor are now displayed as separate columns within the Room performance report.
  • A new field for recording a service user's religion has been added to care enquiry and service user records.
  • A new worksheet has been added to the Aged debt by billing party report which shows details of unallocated receipts.
  • The Admissions, discharges and deaths report export has been updated to include a Booking last modified column on the Service users worksheet.
  • Court of protection deputyship (COP) has been added as a power of attorney option for service user contacts.
  • The fee summary report now takes into account up to 12 previous months (90 days by default) when calculating underbilled and overbilled amounts.
  • The date range an invoice relates to is now shown against invoices when viewing the billing tab for residents.
  • A fee contribution table has been added to the Invoiced report showing the breakdown of fees invoiced in the period by contribution type.
  • When entering the party a receipt is assigned to, we now show contact type and relationship (where applicable) in the search options that appear.
  • Billing parties can now be assigned to receipts when importing them in bulk.
  • Added unassigned / unallocated figures are now included in the Aged debt by service user report.
  • Previously credit notes and overpayments would use the term paid when the total value of the credit had been allocated and/or refunded. The term paid in this context was judged to be confusing and not strictly accurate and so CareHQ now uses the term allocated instead.
  • The following columns have been added to the invoice / credit note export for clients who prefer credit note totals to show as negative:
    • Due (signed)
    • Total (signed)
  • Journals (including OpenAccounts) can now be filtered by transaction type.
  • When a financial document is sent to a location the resident resides, the location's name is now always included as the first line of the address.
  • When a receipt is assigned to a key contact for a service user we now show details of the service user on the receipt page.
  • A separate phone number to appear on invoices can now be set against locations.
  • Billing setup fields have been added to the CSV and Excel exports for service users, service user contacts and location contacts.
  • Direct Debit collection transactions associated with an invoice are now displayed when you view the invoice.
  • The following additional filter options have been added to the Invoiced report:
    • Funding type
    • Nominal code
  • When adding or updating a billing contract, the billing party field now includes information about whether the billing party is the resident or a key contact of the resident - and if so, what their relationship to the resident is.
  • Direct Debit transactions can now be searched by billing party name.
  • Statements for location contacts now include the service user name against each relevant entry.
  • Statements for all billing parties now show the total amount of a receipt as well as the amount reconciled from the receipt.
  • A warning is now shown when switching the bank details for an active Direct Debit mandate, advising users this should only be done at the request of the bank / building society (e.g. a Current Account Switching Service (CASS) request).
  • Fixed issue where write offs of credit notes and overpayments exported from the common journal would incorrectly write off in the debit not credit column.
  • Resolved an issue where the aged debt by resident report did not include residents that had unallocated items related to key contact associated with them. This mean the totals for the residents worksheet were incorrect and that the totals were incorrect when viewing the report per location.
  • The assessment outcome email template has now been updated to handle assessments where the care seeker is also the resident.
  • When setting a billing party for expenses as the resident we now check to see if the resident is enabled for billing and if not, raise an error explaining that billing needs to be enabled for the resident first.
  • Respite to Permanent notifications are now sent; an incorrect debug flag for the feature meant it was not active in the live CareHQ environment.
  • SMS messages sent by users no longer contain escaped HTML characters for unicode/special values (e.g. & is no longer escaped as &)
  • Fixed issue where the subject line for some automated emails that included company name, location name or a service user name would incorrectly escape certain characters (for example Jones & Jones would appear as Jones & Jones) in the subject line.
  • Direct Debit advance notice email subject lines now show the collection date; previously they incorrectly showed the payment processing date.
  • Direct Debit PDFs to post are now correctly named with the .zip extension not .pdf extension.
  • Fixed an issue where the outstanding statement would incorrectly show the full amount of a receipt when highlighting an early payment item, rather than just the amount paid early.
  • The sent flag is now correctly set when importing invoices into CareHQ (previously it was always set to false even if specified as true in the import file).
  • Receipts can no longer be added to bank accounts marked as archived.
  • Improved matching of inbound SMS messages to care enquiries so that open care enquiries are prioritised when a mobile number is associated with multiple care enquiries at the same location.
  • Receipts will no longer accept values for negative amounts or clawback amounts.
  • The aged debt by service user report now correctly includes debt parties where there are only unallocated payments assigned to the debt party.
  • Fixed an issue where the totals against individual Referrer type tables within the Acquisitions report were incorrect.
  • Unread but anonymised messages are no longer included in the unread count displayed.
  • The nominal analysis report now correctly handles write offs of credit notes; previously all write-offs were treated as a write off of an invoiced amount.
  • The summary table within the Aged debt by billing party report can now be sorted by total debt; previously this would generate an error.
  • Fixed an issue where archiving an item of literature for a location would result in an error message against the name field stating the name was not unique and preventing users from archiving these documents.
  • Fixed issue where the assessment figures for the Acquisition report were not shown when comparing two periods.
  • Added a warning on the receipts page when Overpayment and Over clawback settings are not configured for an account (previously this would generate a page error).
  • The overdue highlight figure displayed for service users on the billing tab now includes any outstanding credit note amounts.