Care agency software: what a UK provider actually needs

"Care agency software" is a broad phrase covering everything from a rota tool with a carer app to a full back office that runs your rostering, care records, medication, compliance and invoicing. Most UK domiciliary providers start looking for the first and end up needing the second, because the problems that hurt a home care service are rarely contained in one module.

This guide is written for owners, directors and registered managers of UK domiciliary care providers who are buying a system for the first time, or replacing one that has stopped fitting.

The five jobs the software has to do

Everything else is a variation on these.

1. Build and maintain the rota. Visits generated from care packages, scheduled with real travel time between calls, with working time and training checked at the point of assignment. In home care the rota is the operation; if the rota is wrong, everything downstream is wrong.

2. Deliver the care plan to the carer and take the record back. The carer needs the current plan on their phone at the door, and needs to record the visit, the tasks, the medication and any concern in seconds rather than minutes. Anything slower gets batched at the end of the round, and batched records are both worse care and worse evidence.

3. Handle medication properly. eMAR is where the regulatory risk concentrates. You want administration recorded at the time, refusals and omissions captured with a reason, and a manager alerted to a missed medication before the next visit rather than at the end of the month.

4. Produce evidence on demand. Under the CQC's single assessment framework you need to show how you know a person's needs are met. Practically that means being able to pull, for one person over a chosen period, the plan and its full version history, the visits delivered, the medication administered, and every concern raised with what happened next — in minutes, not as a project.

5. Invoice from what actually happened. This is the one most providers underestimate.

Invoicing is where home care software usually breaks

A domiciliary care provider does not have one customer. It has a local authority paying a framework rate for some people, an ICB paying NHS Continuing Healthcare rates for others, private clients paying a third rate, and often direct payments and third-party top-ups sitting on top. The same carer, on the same round, on the same morning, may generate three differently-priced lines for three different payers.

Software that treats invoicing as "hours × rate" cannot express that, so the manager ends up rebuilding the invoice run in a spreadsheet every month. That spreadsheet is where the money leaks: visits delivered but never billed, rate changes applied a month late, and disputes you cannot evidence because the invoice and the visit record live in different places.

What to insist on:

• Funder-aware rates. Different rates per funder, per package, with the correct one selected automatically from the person's record.
• Bills from delivered visits, not scheduled ones. Every invoice line should trace back to a visit that a carer actually confirmed, with the timestamp.
• Capped and split billing. Where a council funds up to a limit and the client or family funds the remainder, the software should split it, not you.
• VAT handled correctly for the parts of your income where it applies.
• A credible dispute trail. When a commissioner queries a line six weeks later, you should be able to show the visit, who delivered it and when it was confirmed.

Compliance, and what software can and cannot claim

No software is "CQC approved" — the CQC does not approve, endorse or certify systems, and a supplier telling you otherwise is describing something that does not exist. What software can honestly do is make evidencing easier and make gaps visible sooner.

Where it genuinely helps: staff compliance records with expiry tracking for DBS, right to work, training and supervisions, so a certificate lapsing surfaces before the shift rather than after; an append-only audit trail so a record cannot be quietly rewritten; and incident and concern logging that ties to the person and the visit.

Separately from CQC, NHS England maintains an assured solutions list for digital social care records, assessed against a defined capability standard. If you intend to use local authority or ICB digitisation funding, check that list first, because funding routes are commonly tied to it. Assurance is a capability assessment, not a quality ranking, and it is not the same thing as CQC endorsement.

The cover problem, which no module solves

Here is the pattern almost every UK domiciliary provider recognises. A carer calls in sick at ten to seven. The registered manager stops doing everything else and starts phoning down a list from memory. Twenty minutes later they have either found someone, moved three other calls to make it work, booked agency cover at a spot rate, or the visit is going to be missed.

Most care agency software marks that shift red and leaves the manager to it. Some will broadcast an open shift to all staff, which is the group message with a login. Very few will rank who could actually cover — free now, near enough, already known to the person, trained for the tasks, not about to breach their hours — and hand a manager a shortlist to approve.

That distinction is worth testing in every demo, because it is where the manager's morning actually goes.

Buying: what to do before you sign

• Demo your own hardest week, not their sample data. Bring a real bad Monday.
• Time the three things you do most. Adding a package, changing a plan, running an invoice batch. Multiply by how often you do them.
• Ask what migration involves and who does it. Getting your people, packages, plans and rates out of the current system or off paper is the largest hidden cost of switching, and the most common reason implementations stall.
• Ask for a twelve-month total for your real headcount, including setup, migration, training and every module you would actually need. Headline per-carer prices routinely exclude eMAR, invoicing or reporting.
• Check whether the price is per employed carer or per active user, which matters a lot if you run bank or relief staff.
• Ask who owns your data and how you get it out. Ask for the export format now, not when you are leaving.
• Talk to a provider of your size using it, not the flagship reference customer.

Where Nanum sits

Nanum is care management software built for UK domiciliary care providers, by Yielda UK. Rostering, care records, care planning, eMAR and funder-aware invoicing run as one system off a single visit record, so the medication chart cannot disagree with the rota and an invoice line always traces to a visit somebody delivered. Pricing starts at £4.50 per carer.

On cover, Nanum ranks available carers on continuity, distance, skills and training and puts the options in front of a manager, who approves every assignment. Nanum recommends; humans approve — that is a design rule, not a setting. Providers who choose to can also turn on Nanum Mode, which extends the search beyond their own team when nobody in-house is free: carer identities stay private until a request is approved, the person's details are not revealed until the carer is confirmed, and a carer's home-provider pay rate is always protected.

Nanum is a newer entrant than the established UK systems. If assurance under the NHS digital social care records programme is a requirement for how you are funding this, check the published assured solutions list before you shortlist anyone, including us.

Frequently asked questions

What is care agency software?

Care agency software is a system that runs the operational back office of a home care provider: rostering and scheduling, care planning, care records, eMAR, staff compliance and invoicing. In a full platform these share one underlying record, so a visit a carer confirms becomes the care record, the medication entry, the timesheet line and the invoice line without anyone retyping it.

How much does care agency software cost in the UK?

Most UK care management systems are priced per carer per month, commonly in the region of a few pounds to around ten pounds per carer, plus setup and migration. Nanum starts at £4.50 per carer. Headline prices are hard to compare because modules such as eMAR, invoicing and reporting are often charged separately, and because some suppliers charge per employed carer and others per active user. Ask for a twelve-month total for your actual headcount in writing.

Can care agency software handle local authority and NHS invoicing?

It should. A domiciliary provider typically bills local authority framework rates, NHS Continuing Healthcare rates and private rates for different clients at the same time, sometimes with capped or split funding on a single package. Software that only calculates hours multiplied by a single rate will push you back into a spreadsheet every month, so ask to see a mixed-funder invoice run on data resembling yours.

Is any care agency software CQC approved?

No. The CQC does not approve, endorse or certify software, and any supplier claiming CQC approval is describing something that does not exist. Software can make it easier to evidence the quality statements in the single assessment framework and to spot compliance gaps earlier. A separate scheme, NHS England's assured solutions list for digital social care records, does assess systems against a capability standard and is often linked to digitisation funding.

Related guides

• Care Planning Software UK: What to Look For
• Rota Software for Care Homes & Home Care: Buyer's Guide
• Best Care Management Platform UK: How to Choose
• What Causes Missed Home Care Visits? And How to Stop Them
• Care management software: the whole platform, explained