Organising your agency with assignments

Assignments pay off when your agency agrees what each type means and keeps them current. This article suggests ways to set them up and use them. None of it is required; pick what fits how your office works.

Choose assignment types for responsibilities, not job titles

Make an assignment type for each question you want to be able to ask, "who is responsible for this person's ...?". For example:

• Care Manager - who looks after the client's care and family.
• Staffing Coordinator - who keeps the client's shifts filled.
• Supervisor - who supervises a caregiver and does their visits and reviews.
• Timesheet Reviewer - who checks a caregiver's timesheets each week.
• Office - which office or region the person belongs to.

Keep the list short. Each type you add is another timeline someone has to keep current. If nobody would ever filter by it, it probably does not need to be a type.

Require the ones that matter

Under Settings, Required Assignments, mark the types every client or caregiver must have, agency-wide or only in one region. New people then ask for them when they are added, and gaps show as Missing. Make it someone's job to open People, Assignments each week and clear the list.

Start everyone's day on their own caseload

• Home. Ask each care manager to set Caseload to Me under Customize. Open schedules, Not confirmed, Not shared and Employee compliance then count only their people.
• Bookmarks. On the Schedule Board, Timesheets and Compliance lists, set Assigned to and Assigned as, save it as a bookmark and star it, so the page opens that way every time.
• A manager's view. A scheduling lead can bookmark the board with Assigned to set to Anyone and Group by Care Manager, to see every caseload side by side with its own totals.

Divide the weekly work by assignment

Because every list can be narrowed by assignment, you can split recurring work without copying lists around:

• Timesheets. Each Timesheet Reviewer filters Timesheets to Assigned as Timesheet Reviewer, Assigned to themselves, and works their own Ready to finalise and Needs attention chips.
• Compliance. Each Supervisor filters the compliance list to their caregivers and their Overdue and Due soon standings.
• Follow-ups. Give reminders to an assignment type rather than a name, such as "Care Manager: call the family after the first week". If the client changes care manager, the reminder goes to the new one.
• Payroll. With an Office assignment on every caregiver, a payroll batch type per office pays each office's caregivers separately.

Change holders on the right day

When a caseload moves to someone new, end the old holder's period the day before the change and start the new one on the day itself. Do not edit the old period to show the new person: that rewrites history, and past counts would credit the new holder with work they did not do.

To move many people at once, such as when a care manager leaves, use Fill on the Assignments page. It asks you to confirm first, since a fill cannot be undone.

Filing and documents

Assignments are about people; documents are organised by inboxes, folders and stamps. The two meet through the people a file is filed under: once filed, a document can be found from anyone's caseload by opening their people. See Filing, stamps and document workflows for ways to divide the filing work.