Overview:
Visual Care is a comprehensive software solution designed in Australia for care service providers, offering essential tools to improve daily operations, from rostering and invoicing to managing client data. Built to meet the needs of organisations working within complex support environments including the NDIS, the platform emphasises efficiency in financial management, scheduling, and documentation.
Strengths:
Invoicing and Financial Management:
Automated Invoicing: Seamless integration with accounting software significantly streamlines the billing process by automating data transfers and reducing errors.
Client Funding Management: The ability to input and track client funding ensures transparency on available resources, helping organisations better manage service provision and compliance.
Agreements Integration: Customisable agreements with specific codes and line items improve the accuracy of rostering and invoicing, minimising misallocations of services.
Rostering and Scheduling:
Streamlined Rostering: Users can easily schedule multiple days from a single entry point, saving time on administrative tasks.
Dual Client Tracking: The ability to roster 1:2 team members ratios and include progress notes for both clients is ideal for shared support services.
Shift Code Highlighting: Visual markers for code errors help quickly identify and rectify scheduling issues.
Budget Warnings: Alerts for overspending within rostering help ensure resource allocation aligns with client budgets.
Key Challenges:
System Limitations in Progress Note Entry:
Progress notes must be entered by the end of the day, which can be challenging for team members working across multiple clients, leading to missed documentation.
Availability Management:
Marking team members' availability is overly complex, requiring manual calculations for future dates. This can lead to errors where team members appear unavailable when they are, in fact, free.
Inflexible Scheduling:
Visual Care’s unavailability feature does not match the custom pay-week structure of all organisations, which can lead to confusion in payroll processing.
System Reliability Issues:
Some codes may be missing during invoice exports, requiring manual resynchronisation. Additionally, timesheet changes after syncing can result in the disappearance of progress notes and mileage entries, creating extra work for team members.
Communication Gaps:
The internal messaging system lacks a “read” or acknowledgment feature, making it difficult to confirm whether team members have received and understood critical updates.
Recommendations:
Enhanced Progress Note Functionality: Allow team members to enter progress notes retroactively to accommodate the reality of dynamic, client-facing work.
Simplified Availability Management: Implement an intuitive availability tracker that accounts for future scheduling without requiring manual calculations.
Pay Week Alignment: Offer customisable settings to align unavailability periods with varying payroll cycles.
System Stability Improvements: Address export issues and ensure that data like progress notes and mileage are preserved, even during timesheet revisions.
Acknowledgment Mechanism: Introduce a read-receipt or acknowledgment feature within the messaging system to improve team communication and accountability.
Conclusion:
Visual Care offers robust tools that improve invoicing and rostering processes for care providers, but several challenges, particularly in system reliability and team members' usability, require attention. However, one of the platform's key strengths is the responsiveness of the Visual Care team to user feedback. Their commitment to enhancing the system based on customer needs positions the platform as a continuously improving solution. With targeted improvements, particularly in usability and system stability, Visual Care has the potential to deliver even greater value to care providers.
