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What's new at Birdie: October

October 28, 2022
Table of contents

Happy October everyone! There’s nothing spooky about what Birdie has been working on this past month. Read on to find out more.

Introducing our new Best Interest assessment

At Birdie, we continue to look for ways we can enable you to paint a complete picture of your care recipients’ needs and risk!


Best Interest Assessment in Birdie

As part of that commitment, we’ve created a new Best Interest assessment. This addition is available within the existing Mental Capacity assessment.

Additional questions within the Mental Capacity Assessment

When any of your care recipients is deemed to not have capacity when the Mental Capacity Assessment has been completed, the new Best Interest assessment questions will appear for you to complete.



Coming soon: Complete peace of mind with skills surfaced while matching

Some care recipients may need specific care or skills delivered during their visit. That’s why we looked to add a range of skills to your care professional's profile and identify how we can ensure that you are utilising your care team's skills and training and delivering the best care to your care recipients.

View and match by skills within Birdie

Our Skills Matching feature will allow you to ensure only care professionals with appropriate skills are scheduled to visit schedules that require extra qualifications.

We'll support this by displaying the Skills Matching status throughout the scheduling experience as well as raising warnings when non-matching care professionals are about to be scheduled.

With Skills Matching, you’ll benefit from:

  • Complete peace of mind with skills information surfaced to schedulers while matching.
  • Ensuring care is undertaken by qualified and trained staff for all your visits.
  • Providing the best possible outcome for your care recipients.

With this, you’ll be able to:

Set skill requirements for visit schedules

  • As part of this, we have enabled you to set skills that are required to deliver a visit schedule for an individual care recipient.
  • Select from 95 searchable skills.

Record skills and competencies across your care staff

  • Record if a skill is training only, or requires a competency sign off.
  • Record if the competency is general or care recipient-specific.

Record skills on the care professional profile

Get warned when scheduling care professionals without the required skills

  • We’ve also created warnings if a visit has skills requirements and a care professional without those requirements is about to be assigned.

Warnings surfaced on the rota screen

Please see the help centre article here, which breaks down how we enable you to record skills for your care professionals, how to set skill requirements to visit schedules, as well as how to leverage the feature when allocating visits.

Please note: the following feature will be available as a separate Birdie offering and add-on. Please reach out to your Account Manager for more information!

Coming soon: Get an immediate understanding of your team's utilisation with Birdie

Birdie’s rota screen will help you get an immediate understanding of your team’s utilisation and how it complies with Working Time Regulation. We’ve introduced helpful visuals and warnings to help you stay on top of - and compliant with - this crucial information.

View utilisation on the rota screen

With Birdie’s new utilisation visuals, you’ll now be able to:

Keep your care professionals’ preferences front and centre

  • Set maximum and minimum working hours for your team based on their preferred hours - and identify if they’ve opted out of the 48-hour Working Time Regulation!

Get an immediate understanding of your team's utilisation

  • Seamlessly view how each of your care professional’s utilisation is stacking against their preferred working hours, directly on the rota screen.

Have total peace of mind with weekly working limit warnings

  • Keep the Working Time Regulation front of mind - and get instantly warned if you have scheduled over a care professional’s weekly limit.

Read more about this in our help centre article.

Please note: the following feature will be available as a separate Birdie offering and add-on. Please reach out to your Account Manager for more information!

Drill into how your pay and invoice rates were calculated!

We know there’s a lot of information that goes into generating payroll and invoices - and that at times it can be hard to understand why a confirmed visit is rated the way it is for payroll and invoicing.

To make this as transparent as possible, we’ve given you a way to quickly see a detailed breakdown of those calculations for confirmed visits. Simply click into any timesheet within the Pay Dashboard - or any row within the Invoice Dashboard - and click the three dots to the right. Then select ‘View visit details.’

Visit rating explanations within Birdie

Within that same menu, you’ll also see the ability to restore a visit back to confirmation tab in the case you’ve noticed an error or accidentally confirmed it.

Restore visit back to confirmation screen

You can access both options from the Pay dashboard and Invoice dashboard. Simply click on the ‘…’ menu on the left of any visit.

Accounting for all your invoice needs

The team has made come recent improvements, accounting for all your needs when it comes to invoices. Read on to see what we’ve done to make things as smooth as possible for you:

Standardise Invoice Groups

  • Previously, you could leverage free text to create and name your Invoice groups. We’ve made some improvements to this, creating more consistency and accuracy in this process. Now, when you input a value or group name, say ‘Weekly’ once, it will then get stored in a dropdown list for the the next person to pick from. Read more about Invoice Groups here.

View Dates on Invoices

  • Invoice dates will now appear on any generated or sent invoices! The date will be the date on which the invoice is generated or sent.

View dates on invoices

Add pre-fixes to Invoices

  • We’ve made it possible to add pre-fixes to invoices within our Finance tab. You can find this set-up within the Invoice Configuration tab of the Finance module.

Set pre-fixes for invoices

Quickly see visit status in the Invoice Dashboard

  • Previously you could not easily identify which visits were cancelled but paid/charged in invoice dashboard - while this was available within the Pay Dashboard. The team has now added a status column to the Invoice Dashboard to make this easier for you and your Finance teams to view.

Introducing a new service type

You can now access an additional Home Help service type within the Birdie platform. This can be used when setting up rates, funding and more within the Finance tab.

Home Help service type available in Birdie

Record expenses for a specific visit!

Birdie’s making it so you can record expenses onto a specific visit!

Record visit-specific expenses

In the event your care professional has incurred an expense out of pocket, i.e. they’ve paid for groceries for a particular care recipient, you’ll now be able to record this onto a specific visit - directly from the Visit Confirmation screen.

Expense categories in Birdie

We’re also making some improvements to how you record ad-hoc expenses.

You can now add categorisations mirroring how you can add a categorisation such as 'groceries' to specific visits. You can also see the description of the expense once recorded.

For more on how to do this, read here.

That's all for now. As always, you can see what we’re cooking up next on our Public Roadmap here!

See you next time! 👋

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