Scheduling & Rota Management 📅

The Schedule section is where you build and manage your entire rota. It is the backbone of your agency's operations. Every visit, every care worker assignment, every invoice, and every alert depends on the schedule being accurate. If the schedule does not reflect reality, your payroll calculations will be wrong, your alerts will not trigger correctly, and your visit reports will not match the plan. CQC expects to see that you have a structured approach to scheduling care, and your OnCare rota provides that evidence.

The Schedule has two main views: Overview and Clients.

Overview shows all your care workers listed on the left side of the screen, with their visits displayed as blocks across the day. You can scroll left and right to see the entire day of visits, and scroll down to see more care workers. This gives you a complete picture of who is working, where, and when for any given day. You can navigate between days to see past and future schedules.

Clients is the second sub-tab. Here, you see individual client schedules for the full week from Monday to Sunday. On the left side, all your clients are listed. You click on a client to see their weekly visit plan. This keeps the view simple and focused, showing one client at a time rather than overwhelming you with every client's schedule at once.

The most efficient way to build your schedule is to create Weekly Visit Plans for each client. To do this, go to the Clients sub-tab in the Schedule. Next to each client's name on the left, you will see three dots. Click on these to see the options: Manage Weekly Visit Plan, Apply Weekly Visit Plan, and View Client Profile.

Click Manage Weekly Visit Plan to set up the recurring visits for that client. From here you can add new visits, edit existing ones, and save the plan. Each visit in the plan includes the day, time, duration, care worker, charge rate, pay rate, and visit type.

Once your visit plans are built, you need to apply them to specific weeks. First, select the week you want to schedule using the week selector on the top right of the screen. Then click Apply Weekly Visit Plan, which you can do either from the three dots next to the client's name or from the purple Apply Weekly Visit Plans button on the top left of the screen. The top-left button lets you apply in bulk mode for all clients at the same time, which is much quicker.

When applying in bulk, you can select all clients or specific ones, then click Apply. The visit plan is not applied indefinitely into the future. You need to repeat this process for each week you want to schedule: select the next week, apply the visit plan, select the following week, apply again, and so on. This only takes a couple of seconds per week and gives you full control over exactly which weeks are scheduled.

Important Rule: You cannot edit or change the details of a visit that has already been processed.

There are two different ways to edit a scheduled visit, depending on whether you want to change a single visit or update a repeating weekly schedule.

Use these steps if you only want to change the details for one specific visit on a specific day:

Use these steps if you want to change a recurring visit so that the updates apply to all future weeks:

If you need to add a one-off visit that is not part of a weekly visit plan, you can click anywhere on the Overview to add a new visit. When you create a visit, you can set the following details:

When selecting a care worker, you will notice that some names may appear greyed out. This means they are not available for that time slot because they already have another visit scheduled, they have an event on their calendar (such as holiday or sick leave), or it falls outside their working hours. You can only select care workers who are available, which helps you avoid scheduling conflicts.

Unallocated visits occur when a visit is on the schedule but no care worker has been assigned to it. This can happen when you set up visits without selecting a care worker, or when a care worker who was allocated becomes unavailable (for example, due to sick leave) and needs to be replaced.

Unallocated visits are highlighted in red on the schedule. A red tag also appears at the top of the Overview showing the total number of unallocated visits. In the Clients sub-tab, you will see small tags with numbers next to each client's name, showing how many unallocated visits that client has. These tags update automatically.

To resolve unallocated visits, you can select one or multiple visits at the same time and reallocate them to a new care worker. You can do this from the Overview, from the unallocated visits section, or from the Clients sub-tab. Unallocated visits are covered in more detail in a separate article.

Only office staff can add events to a care worker's calendar. Events include sick leave, holidays, training days, or any other reason a care worker is unavailable. Care workers cannot request leave or block out their own calendar through the app. When an event is added to a care worker's calendar, any visits scheduled during that time become unallocated and need to be reassigned to another care worker.

To add an event for a care worker you need to:

Once it's saved it's going to block out the calendar for that care worker. If ever shifts were already allocated to this care worker you will get a notification saying that you have new unallocated visits. Simply click on thos and reallocate to an available care worker. You can also bulk reallocate visits by clicking on the little square on the top right of a visit cell inside the rota

Once your schedule is built, you need to click Publish on the top right of the screen to make the rota visible to care workers on their mobile app. Until you publish, care workers cannot see any new or updated visits. Care workers can only see the next two weeks of scheduled visits on their app at any time. There is no option to show three or four weeks ahead.

Currently, there is no audit trail for publishing the rota. You cannot see which office staff member published or made changes to the schedule. This is a feature that is coming soon.

The schedule does not automatically optimise routes or minimise travel time between visits. You need to consider travel logistics yourself when assigning visits to care workers. The schedule does not prevent double-booking a care worker, though greyed-out names when adding visits help you avoid this. The schedule does not automatically reassign visits when a care worker goes on leave; their visits become unallocated and must be manually reassigned.

Care workers cannot take or claim open shifts on their own. All scheduling is managed by office staff. Care workers also cannot request holidays or time off through the app. They need to contact the office, and office staff add the event to their calendar. There is no shift-swap or open-shift feature for care workers.