A whiteboard of placements
Your agency runs a growing live-in service alongside hourly visits. Each live-in client has a main carer who stays for a set number of weeks, then a second carer takes over. Carers need their daily break covered, sometimes by an hourly carer from a nearby run. Travel days, train tickets and handover days all need arranging.
The rostering system is built for 30-minute calls. So live-in placements are planned on a whiteboard in the office, with a spreadsheet for pay. A carer's flight home is delayed and the replacement cannot arrive. A daily break cover is forgotten for a week. The family is invoiced for a handover day at the wrong rate.
Why live-in care is hard to schedule
Live-in placements are long blocks, not visits. Rostering tools designed for short calls either cannot represent them or make them awkward. So the most valuable work in the agency is often the least well tracked.
Each placement has its own rules: rotation length, how breaks are covered, how many nights a carer may be woken, what the family pays for handover days, how travel is paid. These are set in contracts and policies, but applied by memory.
Handovers between live-in carers are critical. The incoming carer needs to know weeks of detail about the client. Those notes are often a conversation at the door and a notebook.
Many live-in carers also work for more than one agency across the year, or travel long distances between placements. Their availability, travel preferences and the clients they have worked with before matter a great deal when planning the next rotation, and that knowledge usually sits with one placement coordinator.
What informal live-in planning costs
| Gap | Effect |
|---|---|
| Breaks not covered | Carers working without the break agreed |
| Rotation gaps | Last-minute scramble when a carer cannot travel |
| Handover in a notebook | Incoming carer missing key details |
| Pay worked out by hand | Errors in day rates and travel |
| Invoicing mistakes | Families billed wrongly for handover days |
Live-in carers work in isolation for weeks at a time. Getting their breaks, travel and pay right is one of the few ways the office can show it has their back.
Placement scheduling we build
- A placement record for each live-in client: rotation pattern, main carers, break arrangements and family contacts.
- A calendar for each placement showing who is in place, rotation dates, travel days and handover days, with gaps highlighted weeks ahead.
- Break cover booked as visits in your rostering system through its API, so the hourly team sees them and they are not forgotten.
- Travel arranged and recorded against the rotation, with reminders for bookings and a note of costs.
- A structured handover for each changeover, written by the outgoing carer on their phone and read by the incoming carer before arrival.
- Pay and invoicing from the placement calendar: day rates, handover days and travel applied from your contracts, exported to payroll and posted to Xero, Sage or QuickBooks.
Working time and rest arrangements for live-in carers depend on your contracts and your adviser. The system applies the rules you set and shows when a placement breaks them.
Placements you can see ahead
The office sees every live-in placement for the coming months in one view, with gaps flagged early. Break cover is on the hourly rota, not in someone's head. Incoming carers arrive already knowing the client.
Pay and invoices come from the same calendar, so a handover day is paid and billed as your contracts say. Growing the live-in service no longer means growing the whiteboard.
Is your live-in service like this?
- Live-in placements are planned on a whiteboard or spreadsheet
- Daily break cover is sometimes missed
- Handovers rely on a conversation and a notebook
- Pay for live-in carers is worked out by hand
- Families query invoices for handover or travel days