Rate Sheets and Pay Rates 💸

Rate sheets are one of the first things you need to set up in OnCare. They define how much care workers are paid for each hour of work and how much clients are charged for the care they receive. Rate sheets are also where you configure your travel time and mileage rates. Every financial calculation in OnCare, from payroll reports to invoices and mileage reports, depends on the rates you set up here.

If your rate sheets are not set up correctly, every financial output from OnCare will be wrong. Getting rate sheets right from the start saves significant time and prevents costly errors.

Rate sheets are found in Settings > Rate Sheets. There are four sections:

For care worker pay rates and client charge rates, you can add as many rates as you want. For each rate, you simply enter a name and an hourly amount. All rates are calculated by the hour. OnCare does not use half-hour or 45-minute rate brackets.

If a care worker completes a visit that is longer or shorter than a full hour, OnCare calculates the amount using a pro rata method based on the hourly rate. For example, if you set a rate of £30 per hour and a care worker completes a 64-minute visit, the system will calculate the pay for the full hour plus the additional 4 minutes as a percentage of the hourly rate. It does not round up to the next bracket or apply different rates for overtime. It simply takes the proportional amount based on the exact time worked.

Setting up rate sheets is straightforward. Go to Settings > Rate Sheets, add a name for each rate (for example, "Standard Weekday Rate", "Weekend Rate", "Bank Holiday Rate", or even a specific care worker's name like "Andrew Rate"), enter the hourly amount next to it, and click Save. You can create as many rates as your agency needs to cover different scenarios.

Common examples of rates you might create include separate rates for weekday hours, evening and weekend hours, bank holiday hours, different funding types (local authority vs. private clients), and individual care worker rates if they are paid differently.

There is no way to automatically assign a rate sheet to a care worker's profile so that it applies to all their visits. Instead, rates are applied at the visit level. When you create a new visit on the schedule, you need to select the charge rate and the pay rate for that specific visit. You choose from the rates you have set up in your rate sheets. This takes just a couple of seconds.

The key time-saver is the Weekly Visit Plan. Once you have set up a visit with the correct rates and saved it as part of a client's weekly visit plan, that visit will be repeated with the same rates every time you apply the visit plan to future weeks. This means you only need to select the rates once per visit when building the plan, and they carry forward automatically each week.

If you create a brand new visit outside of the visit plan, you will need to manually select the charge rate and pay rate for that visit. There is no default rate that applies automatically to new visits.

The mileage rate is also configured within rate sheets. If you reimburse care workers for travel between visits, make sure you have entered a mileage rate (for example, 0.45 per mile). If no mileage rate is set, the Mileage report will show distances but will not calculate the reimbursement amount. The travel time rate works the same way and determines how travel time between visits is costed in reports.

When you run a payroll report in OnCare (under Reports > Payroll and Invoicing), the system uses the rate sheets to calculate each care worker's pay for the selected period. It looks at every completed visit, identifies the applicable rate that was assigned to that visit, and calculates the pay based on the actual or scheduled time using the pro rata method described above.

When you create invoices, OnCare uses the client charge rate assigned to each visit to calculate the total amount due. The invoice pulls in all visits for the selected period and applies the correct charge rate to each one. If different visits have different charge rates (for example, weekday vs. weekend), the invoice will reflect this accurately.