Carers pay rates may differ within a working week, so rather than creating a number of different contracts you can capture this by using the default rate as well as the unsociable hours section when creating a carers contract.

Each contract needs to have a default hourly rate. This is the ideal place to set your most commonly used hourly rate, i.e. your day time rate.

Here you can override the hourly rate for defined time periods, whether weekday/weekend, bank holidays, or 'Special Days'.

Each entry for unsociable hours is referred to as a range. You can specify the hourly rate, and any non pro-rata rates for the range.

Using the above example, the default rate of £10.00 would be paid between 07:00 and 17:59. Between 18:00 and 06.59 they would be paid £15.00.

If after 23.59 the next day was a weekend or a public holiday, the pay rate would then change accordingly.

If a booking covers multiple unsociable hours ranges e.g. day and evening rates, you can choose whether to use the first rate that applies, or break down the visit using all unsociable hours ranges.

Using the above figures, a booking starting at 17:30 for 1h on a weekday starts in the default hourly rate - £10.00 and finishes in the weekday evening rate - £15.00.

If we break down the visit using all ranges the visit spans (assuming no non pro rata rates) the visit would be paid at:

30m at £10 (£5) + 30m at £15 (£7.50) = £12.50

Whereas if we used the range from the visit start, it would just take 1h of £10 = £10