The natural response for care home owners and managers seeking a solution to staffing headaches is to look for staff scheduling software. Logical, but not always the right approach, because care homes present a special challenge when it comes to managing staff rotas and pay rates.
Special staffing needs require specialist software
Unlike most businesses, there are legal definitions for the number of staff required to care for residents and regular inspections by a range of statutory authorities test that these staffing ratios are adhered to.
Care home staff rotas change frequently due to sickness and holiday absenteeism and are often supplemented by part-time or casual staff who can be called upon at short notice. Full-time staff may need to work in different job functions to cover absences and be paid different rates for each role they perform. Hourly rates can be different for weekdays, weekends and public holidays, and change if the employee works over agreed contracted hours.
In addition, care home managers and staff are focused on providing care. Dedicated office staff are at a premium and often the manager or team responsible for creating the rota may find it easier to do so manually or with a general business package, such as Microsoft’s Excel or Word. All these factors point to considerable difficulties in implementing a software application that combines scheduling, timesheet management and payroll analysis.
That’s why easyLog created its e-Log+ software. We recognise that keeping a rota up to date, with the access and constant change associated with a care home, is difficult. The e-Log+ application therefore focuses on simplifying and automating the key tasks of accurate staff attendance records, absence management and producing a comprehensive payroll analysis.
How e-Log+ simplifies the payroll process
e-Log+ does this by comparing the timesheet data of each employee against a set of user definable shift times per job function. If a match is found the hours are passed automatically for payment. Any attendance that does not agree is presented in an authorisation routine that allows the manager to pay or part pay at any applicable pay rate or disallow if appropriate. Staff can be paid at different rates for working in each job they perform so that an accurate and comprehensive breakdown of paid hours can be achieved, no matter how complex the pay rate structure.
e-Log+ holds one more great feature: from the authorised hours of each employee, the software retrospectively produces an on-screen rota thereby enabling a cross-check against the externally held master rota. What’s more the user can enter any holiday, sickness, training or other absence on this rota to provide a comprehensive and complete staff and pay record.
So when does a staff scheduling problem not require a staff scheduling solution?
When the organisation is using the intelligent response provided by easyLog’s e-Log+ software, of course.