Assignments: who looks after whom

An assignment says which employee is responsible for a client or a caregiver in one particular way. Your agency decides the kinds, called assignment types. Typical ones are Care Manager and Staffing Coordinator for clients, Supervisor or HR for caregivers, and the office a person belongs to.

Assignments are one of the most useful things to keep up to date in CareComplete. Most of the system can be narrowed to "the people assigned to me", so good assignments mean everyone opens their screens on their own work.

One holder at a time, kept as a timeline

Each assignment type has one holder on any day. When a client moves from one care manager to another, you do not overwrite the old care manager. You end their period and start the new one. The client's Assignments tab keeps the whole timeline.

This matters because questions about the past are answered as they were then. When CareComplete looks at an assignment on a day - who to remind, whose caseload a shift was in, which office a visit was billed under - it uses whoever held it that day, not whoever holds it now. If you correct a date after the fact, the answers follow the correction.

There is no separate "covering" assignment. If a care manager is away for two weeks and someone else takes their clients, that is a change of holder for those two weeks, and a change back when they return.

The office is an assignment too

Your agency's office or region is set the same way, as an assignment type held by an employee record that stands for the office, such as "Riverside Office". That means the office follows the same rules as any other assignment: it has a history, it can be required, and everything that filters by assignment can filter by office.

What assignments drive

• Caseloads. A person's caseload is everyone they are assigned to. The Caseload setting on Home makes every dashboard count just your clients and caregivers, or a colleague's.
• Lists. The People list, Timesheets, Compliance, Documentation, task alerts and Communications all have Assigned to, usually with Assigned as to choose which kinds of assignment count.
• The schedule board. It opens on the people assigned to you, and Group by an assignment type puts each care manager's or office's people under their own heading with their own totals.
• Reminders. A reminder about a client can be assigned to an assignment type, such as Care Manager, rather than a named person. It then shows on the calendar of whoever holds that assignment on the reminder's day.
• Announcements. An announcement can be aimed at the caregivers working for one care manager's or one office's clients.
• Forms. A form's audience can include the client's care team: the people assigned to the client.
• Payroll batches. A payroll batch type can pay only the employees assigned to one office, so each office can run its own batch.

Assignments organise; they do not hide

An assignment does not stop anyone else from seeing a person. What someone may see and do is set by their role's permissions: a role that may read clients reads every client. Assignments decide what opens first and what is counted, so each person sees their own work without losing sight of the rest of the agency.

The exceptions are deliberate and narrow: a form's audience can reach a client's care team, and a caregiver in the portal only ever sees their own shifts and their own clients' documents.

Required assignments are reminders, not gates

Your agency can say that every client must have a care manager, or that every caregiver in one office must have a supervisor (Settings, Required Assignments). A missing one never stops you saving or scheduling. Instead it shows as a Missing row on the person's timeline and on the Assignments page under People, where you can fill many at once.

Likewise, changing a person's status never ends their assignments. If a care manager leaves, their clients are not silently left without one: they show as Holder not current until you reassign them.

To set or change assignments, see Contacts and assignments. For ways to use them day to day, see Organising your agency with assignments.