Time is one of the most precious resources for any business, and as one of the most finite, finding ways to both maximise the time available and save it can have a major impact on both business performance and staff retention.
Digitalisation in the care sector picked up steam during the pandemic and as the transformation process continues, many more care businesses are seeing the value of using software to save precious time on administration. The added advantage here is where time is saved on admin, it can be freed up to deliver care to residents.
The decision for an older person to go into care is often deeply personal for the individual and their family, making invoice accuracy incredibly important for care homes where fee errors can create distress. On average, care homes make around 15 fee adjustments per month as care needs evolve and funding situations change, with some making over 100 adjustments when needed.
Using care home management software to support invoice processing and generation both reduces the time taken and simplifies the process. Based on the averages, a manual fee change takes an estimated 15 minutes. Care home administration software brings this down to just a few clicks, saving care homes around 2.5 hours in an average month and much more in months with greater volumes of changes.
There are also opportunities for time savings across staff processes too. Care home staff clock in and out a lot – with some 696,000 care home staff in the UK, the number of times is in the millions. Care home management software can automatically add clock-in times to timesheets and ‘snap’ to the appropriate shift time, saving time for staff daily and also for payroll teams at the end of the month.
Meanwhile, the average care home receives an average of 21 holiday requests each month. Where a manual holiday request takes a total of around 15 minutes, versus a digital process taking an estimated 5 minutes, care homes stand to save around 3.5 hours each month through digitisation.
While some of these savings may seem small in isolation, when experienced as a whole, the time truly adds up. The processes mentioned above alone stand to recoup almost an entire staff day a month. Undergoing digital transformation and adopting care home administration software has the power to make care homes stronger as businesses, reducing costs through automation and increasing accuracy. Meanwhile, the same software can reduce the workload and ease the weight of the administrative burden, aiding in both workplace wellbeing and staff retention.
Fiona Hale, Managing Director of CoolCare
Fiona Hale is the Managing Director of CoolCare. Centred on admin made easy, its services are aimed at making operating care homes easier, more efficient and more profitable.
Following three decades of care home administration software development, CoolCare knows what good looks like – and it seeks to help care homes love their admin by making it simple. Its intuitive design drives higher staff confidence and increases the impact of digital adoption, while CoolCare’s user-friendliness is legendary, making it the software of choice for some of the UK’s leading care home operators.
