This is your introductory guide into CareLineLive, this guide will take you through the basic functions of the system to help get you up and running as smoothly as possible.

These areas will be covered in more depth in your onboarding sessions.

The 4 key functions of CareLineLive are:

There are 3 main components, or entry points, the CareLineLive system:

This is where the majority of the action happens. The web environment allows you to manage:

The app can be used by carers to:

You can optionally grant access to view a client's visit records, notes, and tasks to their family members.

CareLineLive is cloud hosted, allowing it to be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection. There are no complicated servers for you to manage in the office, we take care of all of that for you.

Before starting to use the software, it should be noted that Google Chrome is the only browser we recommend and officially support. It is frequently updated with new features and security fixes, and has proven more reliable for our purposes than other browsers. Your mileage may vary with other browsers.

For more information on system requirements, click here.

For the mobile app, the minimum requirements are Android 5.0 (Lollipop) and above, or iOS 12.2 and above. The app is not supported on Windows phone.

Each of our customers is given their own “environment” - what we call the collection of services that runs your installation of CareLineLive. In order to access your environment, we'll assign you a unique URL which will be sent to you after your first onboarding session.

The URL is both how you can access the management portal, and how carers can log in using the app. This URL is unique to you as a customer - your log in details will not work on any other URL!

Your URL will typically look something like: [your-company].carelinelive.app - where [your-company] is the unique subdomain we give to you.

Once you’ve logged in for the first time, you’ll be taken to…

The dashboard is the first screen you will see when you log in to CareLineLive. The first time you log in, there will not be much in here of note as it shows what is or is set to happen that day.

What the Dashboard does show initially, is which user is logged in, their user role and some of the recent updates we've made to CareLineLive. These are on the right hand side and each link to a relevant article containing more information.

Once you have set up your carer and client rotas, you will be able to see the next 10 upcoming bookings, and the 10 most recent check-ins.

Accounts grant access to your CareLineLive installation. There are no limits to how many accounts that can access the management portal, or the amount of people that can be logged in at any one time.

Accounts will also need to be created in order to allow carers to log in via the mobile app.

Before creating new accounts, there are a couple of areas worth mentioning first.

Each account will need to be assigned a User Role, this will grant/limit access to certain areas within the environment based on what permissions are set. It is not possible to create new user roles, but it is possible to amend the roles, including the names, to customise them based on your organisation's needs.

The Administrator role has access to all areas, it is possible to have multiple administrators but it is not necessarily a good idea to do so to reduce the chance of mishaps!

Where multiple teams are in the environment, the Branch Manager role is good as it has almost the same access as the Administrator, but only for the teams the user is allocated to.

The Registered Manager, Coordinator, and Supervisor roles are all similar: by default they do not have access to financial functionality.

There are three roles that cannot be assigned and are not editable, these are the ones which do not have access to the environment.

If you want to learn more about user roles, take a look in this article. If you are still unsure about amending the user roles, get in touch with our support team for guidance!
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If you have multiple branches, it is possible to set these up as a different team. This means you will all share the same environment but, depending on the user role assigned, will be restricted to certain teams. It is possible to be part of multiple teams for both users, clients and carers.

Where the need for multiple teams is validated, it is a good idea to assign the Branch Manager role to the leader of that team. This role has most of the same permissions as the Administrator, but is limited to only the teams that they are part of.

It is not advisable to create new teams unless there is a definite need, teams are difficult to remove once they’d been created. When teams are not used correctly, it can create complications when it comes to:

To create an account, go to Accounts on the navigation bar and click the + icon in the top right hand corner of the next page.

This will take you to a menu where you will need to fill out a form with the following information:

Once you have filled this out, click Create; the user will now be able to log in using the email and password.

When this has been created, you will be taken to the user’s account page where you have the options to:

*You can create a carer profile if the user is also performing carer duties. For this, click the “Make user a carer” button, select the team(s) they will be assigned to and click create. They will then use the same log in details for the Carer Companion App.

Click here for a general guide to user accounts.
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Once you have created the user accounts, you can begin creating your client and carer records.

Your client records is where you keep all your information about the client. This includes:

Start by creating a Service Contract Type. A Type is a template contract that you can apply as a default for client contracts. Each client can have multiple contracts depending on their care package. When a contract is assigned to a client you can adjust it if necessary, however if there are a number of changes you may find it more manageable to create a new Service Contract Type. This also helps you to keep organised!

These two articles will help with the creation of contracts. The article titled rates will also be useful when creating carer contract types.

Next take a look in Clients > Client Types. When a client is created, you need to assign a client type. There are two in the system initially; Private and Social Services but you are able to amend these, add or remove them. These types don’t offer a great deal of bearing on the system but it is possible to filter various reports with them.

Once you have created your Service Contract Types, you can begin creating client records.

Go to the Clients page from the navigation bar. You should notice there are 3 sections in the sub-menu:

From any of these pages, click on the + icon in the top right corner, this will bring up a new menu which you will need to fill in. More information is in the support article below.

Click here for more details on creating client records.
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The only information you need to enter is the name of the client, and the address to be able to show carers where to go. The more information that you enter, the better use you can get out of the system and the more detailed your client profiles will be. All this information can be entered afterwards and updated at any time.

Once your client record is created, you can assign their contract(s) and adjust if necessary.

Next we can go into some of the tabs within the client record and what they contain:

This tab contains the information about the people associated with the client including:

To learn more about buyers and carer compatibility, check out these articles:

More details on the medical tab can be found here.
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The rest of the tabs will be covered in more detail in later sections of this guide.

Similar to client records, carer records are where you keep carer information including:

It is a good idea to begin with the contracts first again. These are also a “master template” that can be assigned to multiple users and adjusted for individuals if need be.

Read this article for more information on carer contract types.

Then you can create the carer records in the main carers section.

More in depth details on creating carer records can be found here.

When creating the record, the only required information is the carer’s name. You can also add a user account at this point to save time later and allow the carer to use the app. All this needs is an email address and password (minimum of 6 characters)

You can then add their contract and adjust if necessary.

The carer record can be used as an HR tool on top of the other functions,

The app tab tracks installations of the mobile app on devices, it displays the user account info here as well. It will show:

If the carer is having trouble with the app, this tab is a good place to start.

When a client or carer’s contract is over or no longer needed. It is best to use the Finished option within their service contract. This is so the old contract information is still in the system for reporting purposes. It also means that if you ever need to re-run an old payroll or invoice run then the correct information should still be there.

The scheduling on CareLineLive differs from some other software packages in that the schedule is different from a ‘live booking’. Our schedule entries can be compared to an “expected template” of visits that bookings will be created from. This means you can adjust a client or carer’s schedule without changing already generated bookings and you can adjust bookings without changing the schedule.

Read this article for more information and details on schedule entries and bookings.

CareLineLive has a set of bookings types as a default, you are able to edit, add, or remove these types as you see fit by heading to Rostering > Bookings > Settings > Booking Types. By clicking the + button in the top right, you can add a new booking type with the options:

You can also assign schedule entries, or live bookings to a round. This will allow you to allocate those bookings more easily to a carer rather than assigning them all individually.

To learn more about how to create rounds, click here.
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You are also able to schedule in an alternating weekly schedule cycle. For example, if a client has visits on a pattern, rather than set days.

To learn how to create a schedule cycle, click here.
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Client

The client can have two bookings at the same time. An example of this being two carers visiting for different durations such as personal care and meal prep.

Carer – NOT RECOMMENDED

The carer can have two bookings that occur at the same time. This has the specific intention of when there are two clients at the same address and one carer can see to both of them. Before overlapping carer visits, it is worth contacting the CareLineLive support team to discuss whether there is a genuine need for this.

Once the schedules and bookings have been created, you can see the bookings in the Roster screen in Rostering > Roster. Here you can drag and drop bookings to change the carer or time and create ad-hoc events too. These are:

There is also an unallocated row. This only appears when there are generated bookings that have not been assigned to a carer. You can drag and drop these down to the carer you like and change the time too. Holding shift when you click and drag will lock it to an axis, meaning that you can assign it either to different carers at exactly the same time, or to a different time but only for that carer.

By clicking the cog wheel on the right hand side of the screen, there are a couple of other options:

More information on rostering can be found here.

In the CareLineLive system, publishing is when the rotas are sent to the carer apps and notifiable. As a default, every booking created is automatically published. Should you wish to change this and enable [manual] publishing, you can decide how far in advance you would like your rotas to be made available. It is recommended that you still keep an element of automatic publishing in case there are any bookings that are missed.

Details on how to publish a carer rota can be found here.

You can control the amount that carers get paid for mileage and also some factors that relate to it. This includes the amount per mile, the maximum gap between visits that will still generate mileage calculations and how specific the address of the clients are from a postcode to a geocoded location. It is possible to have different mileage settings per team.

Click here for information on mileage settings.
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The client journal is where you can record and log notes relating to the client and also correspondence between the client and the agency. Examples could be; the client or their family logging a concern, a change to their medication, a change to their care plan. The journal entry types can be set and adjusted in the main settings section. During a visit, the carer can leave notes as they go along, as well as handover and checkout notes that will be visible both in the web environment and in the app for other carers visiting that client to see.

The carer journal can be used to log communications and relevant information such as; Expenses, comments/compliments/complaints etc.

To open up a booking, either double click on it in the roster/agenda and click “View” or select it from the list in Rostering > Bookings. You will then see the details of that booking. There are a number of tabs relating to bookings too, these are:

Most settings in the roster can be adjusted for either a master setting, or for individual teams, there will be a team selector just below the main team selector at the top to set this.

The roster sub-menu contains settings specifically to the roster. These are:

Here you can change the colours seen in the roster such as bookings and availability.

This is where you can enable manual publishing and set the automatic publishing threshold. More information on publishing can be found here.

You can choose to restrict based on a carers availability, there are two options for this:

The thresholds define certain parameters that a carer must fit when visiting clients. If they meet all of these, the booking will automatically ‘confirm’. This means that it has been completed and will be included in invoices/payroll. Automatic confirmation can be turned off.

Click here for more details on how to set up roster thresholds.

You can set tasks to be completed for a client that coincide with bookings. There are two types of task:

Both task types are tied to time slots and not individual bookings

To learn how to create tasks, check out the Tasks article.

If your tasks, or schedule are set to happen in a pattern or an alternating weekly cycle, you can account for this by creating a task schedule cycle.

Click here to learn how to create a task schedule cycle.
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Before you start using the carer companion app, it is worth taking a look at the app settings that you can control within your environment. You can allow checking in/out without a QR code, require a check out comment and enable soft authentication.

For details on how to set up the carer app, take a look here.

The mobile app is the carer interface for the software, this is the tool that they will use to view their rota, check in and out of visits and complete tasks on. If you are on a BYOD licence, your carers will need either an Android or iOS device. The minimum operating system requirements can be found in the system requirements support article.

To check into a visit, the carer will need to click the <Check in> button for the visit, scan the QR code and confirm. The checkout process is the same and gives the carer a summary of the visit including any tasks that still need to be completed and gives the option of a handover note/checkout comment.

To find out where the data shown in the app comes from, take a look at this article.

Look in here to learn how to make notes in the carer app.
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Once you have checked in with the app, you can check the dashboard to show that the booking is now in progress.

To complete a task within the app, go to the tasks tab and select the task you want to complete. Clicking on the task should bring up a completion menu, select the option that you wish and enter any comments as necessary and save it. The task should then have a green tick next to it and appear in the “prompted” section in the web environment.

When the booking has been checked out of the dashboard will update to either “visited” or “confirmed” depending on whether the call fit all three thresholds defined earlier. If it has not been automatically confirmed, you will need to do that manually.

Instructions on how to confirm bookings can be found here.

For use as an HR tool, requirements are things such as DBS checks, passport etc. This can also include qualifications, to add in qualifications and requirements head to settings and create them as needed.

Documents can also be a requirement, adding in a document that is a requirement or completing training for a qualification will automatically complete the requirement. Adding in an expiration date for the requirement will also give you a countdown of how long in days/weeks/months/years before it expires.

You can run a report for requirements to see expirations as well.

These two articles contain more information about requirements and qualifications:

You can also set carer or client reviews for things such as competency training, care package reviews. These can be scheduled in the review section in either the client or the carer and completed with/without notes if needed. You can create review types as well depending on your needs. Upon completion you have the option to schedule in the next one.

Running the carer or client reviews reports will tell you when you have upcoming reviews.

Click here for more details on reviews.

You can add friends and family to the family module so that they can access the family portal. This gives them a view into what bookings their loved ones have and which carer(s) are allocated to the bookings.

For information on how to set up and use the family module, take a look here.

Employee settings:

Before you run your invoices, it is a good idea to sort out your invoice settings. These are more visual settings such as display density and invoice number. Some of these get more difficult to change after an invoice run has been created.

This article contains more information relating to invoice settings.

You can generate invoices based on visits and transactions in the system. For this to work, there are certain pre-requisites that must be fulfilled:

To create an invoice run, head to Financial → Invoices → Invoice Runs, then click the + button in the top right hand corner. Select the options you want and click create.

Once the invoices have created, you can check individual ones to make sure they are correct and adjust the line item if you need to. You can also add additional payments on to an invoice or credit them.

Once you area happy with the invoice, you can issue them, click on “issue” and you can then export them for sending out.

Click here for more information creating invoice runs.
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You can also create an invoice for a single client, to do this, head to Financial → Invoicing → Invoices and click the + button in the top right hand corner. You can then select the client and click create - when creating a single client invoice, you will need to manually add all the visits you want to invoice. Any confirmed bookings that have not already been invoiced will be available for selection.

If you need to create an invoice for a single client, check out this article.
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Similarly to invoicing, there are a few pre-requisites that need to be fulfilled.

When you have done all of these, go to Financial > Payroll > Payroll Runs and click the + button in the top right hand corner. Select the options you want and click create.

Once again you can view the individual invoices to make sure they are correct. Once you are happy, lock the payroll and you can export the payslips ready to send to your carers and pay.

For details on running payroll, click here.
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