Monday's spreadsheet from every home
You run several care homes. Every Monday each manager fills in a spreadsheet: occupancy, admissions and discharges, enquiries, agency hours, sickness, incidents, complaints, safeguarding, audits done, debt. Some fill it in on Monday morning. Some on Tuesday. One always forgets.
Head office combines them into a group report. By Wednesday it is ready, and by then some of it is out of date. One home counts respite residents in occupancy and another does not. The agency figure from one home is hours, from another it is spend.
Home managers resent the time it takes. The directors distrust the numbers. Both are right.
Why group reporting is so manual
Each home has its own systems, sometimes different ones because of acquisitions: a care management system, a rota tool, an accounts package, a spreadsheet for enquiries. The data exists, but only inside each home's tools.
The weekly spreadsheet is the glue. It relies on the manager reading figures off several screens and typing them in, with their own interpretation of each question. Definitions drift over time and between homes.
There is also no history. Each week's spreadsheet replaces the last, so trends are rebuilt by hand whenever the board asks.
There is a people cost too. A good home manager asked to spend Monday morning copying figures into a template, then asked on Wednesday why one of them looks odd, starts to feel that head office trusts the spreadsheet more than them. That is not a small thing when you are trying to keep managers.
What the Monday spreadsheet costs
| Weakness | Effect |
|---|---|
| Manual entry | Manager time taken from the home |
| Different definitions | Figures not comparable between homes |
| Late arrival | Decisions made on last week's picture |
| No history | Trends rebuilt by hand |
| No drill down | Head office cannot see what sits behind a number |
The lack of drill down matters when something looks wrong. A rise in agency hours at one home needs a question answered: which unit, which shifts, why. The spreadsheet cannot tell you.
The group dashboard we build
- Agreed definitions for each measure, written down and applied to every home, such as how occupancy is counted and what counts as agency use.
- Connections to each home's systems through their APIs or scheduled exports: care management, rota, accounts, and enquiry tracking.
- A data store that holds history, so every figure has a trend and can be compared across homes and over time.
- A short weekly form for anything that cannot be pulled automatically, with the previous week's answers filled in for the manager to update.
- A group dashboard with each home side by side, and drill down from a figure to the detail behind it.
- Alerts to the regional or operations manager when a figure crosses a threshold you set, such as occupancy falling or overdue audits rising.
Where a home's system cannot be connected, we say so, and that home uses the form for those figures until it can.
A Monday that belongs to the homes
Home managers stop filling in the big spreadsheet. The figures are pulled overnight and the form takes a few minutes. Head office sees the week's picture on Monday morning, comparable across homes, with history behind it.
When something looks wrong, the drill down shows where to look. And the board's quarterly questions are answered from the same data rather than a special exercise.
Is this your group?
- Every home fills in a weekly spreadsheet for head office
- Homes count the same measure in different ways
- The group report is ready midweek
- Trends are rebuilt by hand for board meetings
- Homes acquired over time use different systems