Carer Contracts
Dec Norton avatar
Written by Dec Norton
Updated over a week ago

Carer contracts allow you to control how a carer will be paid for their work. Contracts can be associated with both Bookings & Shifts. They function similarly to client service contracts, but the options available vary.

The contract system is split into Contract Types & Contract assignments. Contract Types allow you define "master" options for each contract assignment. You may use Contract Types to categorise your workers, for example you may have separate contract types for Trainee, Carers, Senior Carers, Office Workers, and senior Office Workers.

In order for a carer/worker to be considered active, they will need to have a contract assigned. A contract assignment will inherit its options from its contract type; unless you choose to override them. A contract assignment requires start date and can have a finish date, and finishing reasons.

A carer can have multiple contracts assigned, allowing you to choose payment settings when allocating carers to calls. For example you may want to assign separate contracts for Personal Care & Live In Care, each with their own rates & settings.

There will always be a default contract, which will automatically selected when allocating a carer to a call via the roster.

To create and manage contract types, head the carers section on the navigation bar and select contract types towards the bottom left of the screen.

Option Sets

Option sets are a new addition to contract functionality. Their purpose is to allow you flexibility in scheduling rate increases or changes to options. For example, you may wish to increase a contract's hourly rate in the new financial year, or start paying mileage from a given date.

Not to be confused with Unsociable Hours, option sets allow you broader control over all of the options available in the contract. You may find that you don't have a use case for option sets.

By default, each contract is created with a single option set. The default option set will apply perpetually unless another one is created at a given date.

Option sets for Contract Types and Contract Assignments work slightly differently. The dates are not tied to each other and work independently of each other, meaning a contract assignment can have a different option set schedule than its type.

Options within a Contract Assignment option set work by either inheriting or overriding individual options from the Contract Type.

In the diagram below, we've given a example of how inherited & overridden options are combined with scheduled option sets in order to get the effective value for a given date. The example given shows a single option, but the same can be applied to any of the options available. We wouldn't expect anyone to need such a complex schedule!

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Options

As we've already touched on, contracts allow configuration of a number of different options related to how carers' are paid. Below we've outlined some of the available options:

Rates

You can define a base hourly rate, as well as rates for unsociable hours and non-pro-rata durations.

The rate options are the same for both client & carer contracts. You can read more about rates here.

Payment Calculation Options

Shift Payment Strategy

Choose whether a shift will be payed via shifts only, bookings only or shifts and bookings. See Shift Payment Strategy for more information. If you're not using Shifts, you can leave this on Bookings Only.

Calculating pay using actual or planned visit times

This option allows you to toggle between calculating the pay based on either the planned visit times or actual. The text in the section will show which it is currently using i.e. using calculating amount using planned times/actual times.

If you are paying by actual times you can use the Rounding feature. This allows you to round the visit time up or down depending on how you prefer to pay. More information here.

Use first hour range when calculating pay

Enabled by default. When disabled, the system will use different rates for any unsociable hour ranges that the shift spans, as opposed to using the first and primary one. For example, a shift may be split between a daytime rate and an evening time rate.

Mileage and travel time

You can set a carer contract so it generates pay for mileage and travel time. The amount generated will depend on the mileage settings either within the contract in custom mileage or in Settings > Mileage. It may also depend on the carer's primary transport in their profile page.

More information can be found here: Mileage

Exclude from holiday pay estimates

You can set it so that all bookings on a particular contract are not taken into account when calculating holiday pay. This could be because they are self-employed workers or if you don't need holiday calculation from CareLineLive.

Visit duration rounding

The rounding feature allows you to round the time of a visit up or down. It can only be used when you are paying by actual time.

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Rounding style

This determines how you will round, the options are:

  • None - no rounding applied and the actual time of the visit will be used

  • Round to nearest - the time will round up or down depending on whether it has reached the mid point (this can be manually adjusted)

  • Round up to nearest - if the visit passes the previous time integer, it will round up to the next.

  • Use planned duration as a minimum - You can set it so that it pays for the planned duration unless the visit overruns, then the rounding will come into place.

Minutes - This is the number you will be rounding to, up to a maximum of 30 minutes.

Middle point (minutes) - You can set the mid point to be used for calculations, if not set, it will take the exact mid point based on the minutes set. For example, if you are rounding to nearest 5 minutes, if the call lasts 22.5 minutes, it will round up to 30 minutes, if it is below, it will round to 20.

Preview rounding - If you are unsure about your settings, you can use the preview rounding section. You can enter an example duration and it will generate the rounded time based on your settings.

Minimum duration - You can set a minimum duration for calculations. If a visit is checked out of before this time, it will still generate that visit length.

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