Home care agencies
Home Care Agency Software for India: The Round, Not the Chart
Schedule caregiver visits, prove the attendant reached the patient’s door, fill the six a.m. sick call, and see what each patient earns you after the attendant is paid. Priced for a twenty-caregiver agency, not an American one.
The six arguments every attendant agency has
- An attendant writes down that she reached at 8. The family says the doorbell rang at 10, and there is nothing on either side except two people who are sure.
- A daughter in Bengaluru phones the office to ask whether anybody is going to her mother today, and somebody has to open a notebook to answer her.
- The regular attendant calls in sick at six in the morning. Finding a replacement means eleven WhatsApp messages, and one patient still gets nobody.
- Time spent travelling between two houses is argued about every month, because nobody records it and everybody has an opinion about it.
- The family pays a monthly rate, the attendant is paid per day, and nobody in the office can tell you which patients are actually making money.
- A visit gets typed into the register a week later from memory, and by then nobody remembers whether it happened at all.
What the product actually does about them
The visit is proved at the door
Each patient’s home is its own geofence. Start visit is refused away from the door, with a selfie and a location on the one that is accepted, so a visit is tied to a place and a face rather than to a claim.
It works in a lift lobby
The attendant’s round for today is saved on the phone. A visit started with no signal is queued with its real time and coordinate, on the same queue every offline check-in uses, and lands when the phone reconnects.
Cover for the six a.m. sick call
Approve the leave and the days nobody is covering are listed, up to 45 days ahead. The screen ranks who is genuinely free that day, and arranging cover grants that substitute the patient’s geofence for those days only.
Charge and pay in one row
What the family was billed, what the attendants were paid to be there, and the difference, per patient and per month. It is the only screen in the product where both halves of the money appear together.
The round, as it stands right now
Who is out, who has started, who finished, who was refused at the door, and what is still not done. A visit nobody starts within about fifteen minutes of its time raises an alert once, and does not nag.
The family stops phoning
Each patient gets one private link a relative can open with no app and no login, showing who is coming and what was done. It never carries a rupee figure. That half is explained in full on its own page.
A visit is proved at the door, or it is not a visit
A refused attempt is written down, with the numbers that settle it
This is the part most products get wrong by omission. When the door rule refuses somebody, there is no session, no flag and no row, which means a fence drawn forty metres too tight looks exactly like an attendant who never turned up. Both end the day as a missing visit and neither tells you which. Every refusal is therefore recorded with how far outside the fence the phone was, how wide the fence is, and what accuracy the phone claimed. A patient whose staff are refused at 45 metres against a 40 metre fence is a fence you need to widen. One refused at 800 metres is a conversation with a person.
Those numbers are computed on the server from the patient’s own pin, never taken from what the phone says about itself, and nothing in a browser can write that table. A staff device that could insert its own refusals could manufacture evidence that a fence is broken for a door it never went near.
The attendant who forgets to check out, which is most of them
A factory worker clocks out because they leave the building at the end of the day. A care attendant does four houses before lunch with the phone in a pocket, and forgetting is the normal case rather than the exception. Left alone, the first visit runs until midnight and every report of that day is wrong.
When somebody checks in at their next patient with the last visit still open, the previous one is closed at the last moment the phone was measurably still inside that patient’s geofence, using the same distance test every check-in is judged by. That is evidence, and it beats a schedule in both directions: closing at the planned end would rob an attendant who stayed an extra hour and overpay one who left after ten minutes. Only when there is no trail at all, because the phone was off or permission was denied, does it fall back to the planned finish, and the record says which of the two it used. The worker is told, and so are you.
A visit typed in later has to say why
Sometimes the phone was dead, or cover was arranged at six in the morning over a phone call. You can record that visit by hand, and it pays and bills exactly like a clocked one, marked as added by you. The reason is a required field, because who typed it in is not the interesting question and why is the entire content of an audit trail.
Travel between visits: shown, deliberately not paid
What this does answer
When somebody calls in sick at six in the morning
The cover list ranks, it does not filter
Anybody on approved leave that day, rostered on a shift that day, or covered by a weekly template for that weekday is excluded. Everybody else is shown, lightest first by how many patients they already carry that day, with ties breaking towards somebody who already visits this patient. What it does not do is hide the busy ones. An attendant with one nine a.m. visit is a real option for a four p.m. one, and in a team of twelve a strictly filtered list is usually an empty list, which teaches you nothing and sends you back to WhatsApp.
The candidate pool is people who already do care work. A shop cashier is not a candidate for somebody’s bedside, and offering one is worse than offering nobody.
Cover is a stretch of days, and it expires by itself
Leave is not a day, it is the twelfth to the nineteenth. Cover is arranged for the whole stretch in one pass, not eight times through the same dialog with eight chances to miss the Thursday. What is saved is an ordinary assignment with an end date, which is exactly what lets the substitute’s phone clock in at that address, and exactly what stops it mattering after the nineteenth. The dialog says so out loud, because a silent change to who can find a patient’s home address is not something anybody should discover later.
A day you have looked at and decided to let go is waived rather than fixed, and it stops being raised at you, even if the leave is later edited and re-approved.
The rate the family pays and the rate the attendant is paid
Two limits the screen prints on itself
A visit whose arrangement carried no charge rate is counted, not priced, and the screen says so rather than quietly showing you a smaller number. A weekly or monthly retainer bills a whole period, so asking for the first half of a month bills the whole month, and the screen says that too. Both are stated where the number is, because an owner who discovers a rule from a figure that looks wrong stops trusting every other figure on the page.
The rate is frozen at the door
When a visit starts, the rate that applies to it is written onto that visit rather than looked up later. Rebuilding March’s payroll in September therefore gives the same answer it gave in March, even though you raised that patient’s rate in June. Re-pricing a patient closes the old arrangement and opens a new one from a date, so history keeps its own prices.
Who in your office may see it
Seeing charges is a separate permission from arranging visits. A scheduling manager can run the whole round, add patients, assign attendants and read the visit history without ever seeing your margin, and the page and the query behind it both check that permission independently. Photographs are a third permission again, because a photo here is a person’s face or the inside of their home.
The family half, in one paragraph
Read the family side in full
What this is not, and who should buy something else
This is not a clinical system
Buy something else if
You employ nurses whose visit notes are clinical documentation. You bill an insurer or a TPA against clinical codes and need claims to come out of the same system. You need doctor orders, care plan reviews or clinical audit trails. You are running a hospital-at-home service where the record is the product. In every one of those cases a clinical home healthcare platform is the right purchase and this is not competing for it.
This is the right shape if
You send attendants, ayahs, caregivers or home nurses to do bathing, feeding, mobility, medicine reminders, physiotherapy support and companionship. You are paid for time at a house rather than for a chart. Your real losses are unproved visits, uncovered days, disputed hours and a margin nobody can see, and your real tools today are a WhatsApp group, a notebook and a spreadsheet that one person understands.
Other things it deliberately does not do
It does not pay for travel time, as set out above. It does not generate a family invoice or collect payment from the family: it tells you what was charged and what it cost you, and your billing stays where it is. It does not roster by skill matching or client preference beyond the tiebreak towards somebody who already visits that patient. And there is no English-only barrier for your staff, but the attendant screens are designed around a face and one large button precisely because reading is not something to assume.
What else comes up when you search for this
| Product | Built around | Priced for | Price on the website |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shiftelio home care | The round: visits, door proof, cover, margin and the payslip that comes out of them | An Indian agency with roughly 10 to 100 caregivers | Yes, from Rs 999 a year |
| CareSmartz360 | US home care agency management, with EVV and insurance billing at the centre | US agencies working to Medicaid rules | On request |
| DocEngage | A clinical CRM and home healthcare suite, with the patient record at the centre | Hospitals and home healthcare providers with clinical staff | On request |
| Zoho, assembled from parts | Nothing in particular. You build the workflow from People, Creator and Forms | Whoever is willing to build it, then maintain it | Yes, per module and per user |
| A notebook and a WhatsApp group | Whatever the office manager remembers | Every agency below about eight caregivers, honestly | Free, until the first serious dispute |
The notebook row is not a joke
What it costs, printed on the page
| Plan | Price a year | Caregivers | Branch locations | GPS proof |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | Rs 999 (Rs 99 a month) | up to 2 staff | 1 location | Included |
| Growth | Rs 5,999 (Rs 599 a month) | up to 25 employees | 3 locations | Included |
| Business | Rs 14,999 (Rs 1,499 a month) | up to 100 staff | unlimited locations | Included |
| Enterprise | Custom | 100+ staff | unlimited locations | Included |
About Rs 240 per caregiver for a year
Home care is switched on for your account, not bought from a dropdown
Getting the first week running
- Add the patients, with a pin on each doorA name, an address and a pin dropped on the actual building. The pin becomes that patient’s geofence, and the note that says third floor, blue gate, ring twice stays on the card where the attendant reads it. Adding a patient also creates the family link, unsent, at the same moment.
- Set who visits, how often, and at what ratePick the attendant and the rhythm, then the rate: per visit, per hour, per day, per week or per month. Two or three visits a day to one patient are separate slots that can share one day rate. The staff rate and the charge rate are two different fields, on purpose.
- Let the round run for a weekAttendants get their own day on their phone: one card per patient, a photo of the face, one large button. They start at the door and finish at the door. You watch the board fill in and read the refusals at the end of the day rather than at seven in the morning.
- Read the margin, then the payrollAt the end of the month one screen shows charged, paid and the difference per patient. The same visits are what payroll pays from, so nobody retypes anything, and the rupee on the margin screen is the rupee on the payslip.
Questions home care owners ask before buying
What is the best software for a home care agency in India?
It depends on whether you are paid for clinical work or for attendance. An agency employing nurses who chart medications, write care plans and bill an insurer needs a clinical system, and there are good ones. An agency sending attendants and home nurses to do bathing, feeding, mobility, medicine reminders and companionship is not paid for a chart. It is paid for somebody being at the right house for the right hours, and it loses money when that cannot be proved, when a visit goes uncovered, or when the rate the family pays and the rate the attendant is paid drift apart unnoticed. Shiftelio is built for the second case, at a flat yearly price starting at Rs 999 a year rather than a quote after a demo.
How do I prove a caregiver actually reached the patient’s house?
Every patient’s home is its own geofence, drawn on the real building. The Start visit button is disabled while the attendant is still down the road, and the server refuses the attempt as well, so a check-in that succeeds carries a location inside the fence, a selfie and a timestamp the phone did not choose. A refused attempt is not silence: it is written down with how far outside the fence they were, how wide the fence is and what accuracy the phone claimed, so a patient whose staff are refused at 45 metres against a 40 metre fence is visibly a fence problem, and one refused at 800 metres is visibly not.
What happens when there is no mobile signal inside the building?
That is the normal case in lift lobbies, basements and thick-walled old buildings, so it is not treated as an error. Today’s round is saved on the phone before the attendant leaves, and a visit started or finished with no network is queued on the device with its own time and coordinate, on the same queue every offline shift check-in uses, then uploaded when the phone next has a connection. The stored time is the time it happened, not the time it uploaded. The attendant’s screen says plainly that it is working offline rather than looking broken.
Does it count the travel time between two visits?
It shows it and it does not pay it, and that is a deliberate decision rather than a gap. The visit report has an attendant view that shows the shape of a round: how many patients somebody saw, how many hours they spent at doors, and the gaps between those doors. The screen says in words that the gap is not counted as work and does not affect anyone’s pay. The reason is that the moment a measured gap changes what somebody earns, it needs a dispute process, an appeal and a correction path, and inventing one badly is worse than being honest that pay is calculated from time at the patient’s house. If you pay a travel allowance, pay it as an allowance.
A caregiver calls in sick at six in the morning. What actually happens?
You approve the leave, and the days that now have nobody visiting are listed for you, across every patient, up to 45 days ahead rather than only for today. The find cover screen answers the whole roster in one go and ranks by who is genuinely lightest that day: it excludes anybody on approved leave, anybody rostered on a shift that day and anybody covered by a weekly template, and it shows what the rest are already carrying rather than hiding them, because in a team of twelve a filtered list is usually an empty list. Ties break towards somebody who already visits that patient. Arranging cover creates an assignment with an end date, which is what lets the substitute’s phone clock in at that address, and what stops it mattering afterwards.
Can I see how much I actually make on each patient?
Yes, on one screen, per patient and per month: what the family was charged, what the attendants were paid to be there, the difference, and the margin as a percentage of what was billed. Two limits are printed on the screen itself rather than left to be discovered. A visit whose arrangement carried no charge rate is counted but not priced. A weekly or monthly retainer bills a whole period, so asking for half a month bills the whole month. The paid half comes from the same engine that produces the payslip, so the two cannot disagree.
Can attendants see what the family is being charged?
No, and this is enforced in three places rather than hidden in the interface. The charge rate is not returned by the function that builds the attendant’s day, it is not requested by any code path on the staff side, and select on the assignments table is revoked from ordinary signed-in users at the database, so a phone could not fetch it even if the app asked. Inside your office it is a separate permission from the one that lets somebody arrange visits: a scheduling manager can run the whole round without ever seeing your margin, and giving them that tick is a decision you make on purpose.
Does it handle two or three visits a day to the same patient?
Yes. Each visit is its own slot with its own start time, so a morning wash, an afternoon medicine round and an evening feed are three cards on the attendant’s phone and three rows in the report. They can share one deal, which is how a patient billed at a flat day rate is billed once for the day no matter how many times somebody comes. Live-in arrangements are handled separately again, with their own auto close, because a 24 hour engagement measured against an eight hour day would be in overtime from hour nine of a day that is paid one flat amount.
Is this an EMR, or a care management system with clinical care plans?
No, and it should not be bought as one. There is no medical record, no clinical assessment, no care plan in the clinical sense, no medication administration record, no prescriptions, no wound or vitals charting and no insurance claim handling. A medication item here is a task on the patient’s standing list that an attendant ticks off, sometimes with a photo attached, which is proof that work was done and is not a drug chart. If your agency employs nurses whose notes are clinical documentation, or you bill an insurer against clinical codes, you need a clinical system and this is not it. What it replaces is the roster, the attendance register, the argument about arrival times and the spreadsheet where the margin was supposed to be.
Do my patients’ homes count against the location limit in my plan?
No. A patient’s address creates a geofence, but it is not a branch, and the count shown against your plan limit only counts branches. An agency with one office and a hundred and forty patients is using one location. This was decided deliberately, because telling a home care business it has exceeded a limit it never touched, and inviting it to buy a bigger plan for it, would be a made-up bill.
What does it cost, and how do I switch home care on?
Plans start at Rs 999 a year and the size most agencies land on is Rs 5,999 a year for up to 25 employees, which is about Rs 240 per caregiver for the whole year. Prices exclude 18 percent GST and were verified against the pricing page in August 2026. Home care itself is an add-on that we switch on for your account rather than a self-serve toggle, because it opens up patients’ names, phone numbers and home addresses and every change to it is written to an audit log. Sign up, then ask us to turn it on.
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