Not care. The admin around it: the rota rebuilt at seven in the morning, the CQC evidence nobody has time to assemble, the fifth recruitment chase this week. We tell you which of it is worth handing over, and in what order.
Most registered managers know AI could take some of this off them. What they are missing is someone who will look at their own week and say which part to hand over first, and which part must never move.
Every uncovered call has to be matched against who is free, who is trained for it, who the person actually knows, and who can get there. Done by phone, under time pressure, before eight.
You know the care is good. Proving it against the key questions means assembling records, audits, training logs and feedback from five systems, and it always lands on the person who can least afford the fortnight.
A generic assistant will happily generate care plan wording that sounds professional and describes nobody. That is not a tool to point at care records. It is a reason to be careful about which jobs go anywhere near AI at all.
None of that is a technology problem. It is a question of which job goes first, and which never goes at all. That is the bit we do.
Every one of these is administrative. None of them makes a decision about a person's care, and the plan draws that line explicitly on every recommendation rather than leaving you to assume it.
A coordinator rings down a list at seven in the morning to find somebody free, trained and close enough to cover the call.
Works out who is available, qualified for that person's needs and within travel time, then offers the visit to them in order and confirms when someone accepts.
Continuity of care. Whether an unfamiliar carer is acceptable for that person is a judgement the coordinator makes, and the automation flags it rather than deciding it.
Applications from four job boards, most of which go cold because nobody replied within a day.
Acknowledges every application immediately, screens against the basics like right to work, driving and availability, books the interview, and chases the references and DBS.
Who you hire, and the interview itself. The suitability judgement is the whole point of it.
A spreadsheet of certificate expiry dates that somebody has to remember to open before an inspection.
Watches every carer's mandatory training, DBS renewal and supervision date, books the refresher with enough notice, and escalates when someone is about to fall out of date.
Signing off competence. A certificate is not the same as being competent and the plan does not pretend otherwise.
Evidence against the key questions dug out of five systems in the fortnight after the call comes.
Collects the audits, training records, feedback and incident data against each key question continuously, so the evidence folder is current rather than reconstructed.
What you say about your own service. The registered manager writes the narrative and nothing drafts it for them.
Reviews slip because the date lives in one system and the coordinator's diary is in another.
Tracks when every review is due, books it, gathers the recent records the reviewer will want in front of them, and chases when it has not happened.
The review itself and every word of the care plan. Nothing automated writes or amends a care plan. That is the line.
Families ring the office for an update, and the office rings the carer to find out.
Sends the routine updates families have consented to on a rhythm you set, so the phone rings less and nobody is left wondering.
Anything that is not routine. A change in condition is a phone call from a person, always.
A late call is noticed when the family rings to ask where the carer is.
Watches the electronic call monitoring against the rota, raises the visit that has not started, and escalates on your own thresholds before it becomes a welfare concern.
The response. Deciding what to do about a missed call is the on-call manager's job and it always will be.
Delivered hours reconciled against commissioned hours by hand, and queried weeks later when the remittance is short.
Matches delivered visits to the commissioned package, flags the variances before you invoice, and assembles the backup the commissioner will ask for.
Disputing a variance. That is a commercial conversation.
A family rings on a Friday afternoon, gets voicemail, and rings the next agency on the list.
Answers the enquiry, captures the situation and the level of need, explains what you cover and where, and books the assessment.
The assessment, and whether you can genuinely meet the need. Taking a package you cannot staff helps nobody.
Policies reviewed when an inspection is coming, half of them referencing guidance that has since changed.
Tracks review dates across the whole policy set, flags the ones that have gone stale, and drafts the update for a manager to work from rather than starting blank.
Approving a policy. It is the manager's document and their name on it.
Supervisions slip quietly for months because nobody owns the diary for them.
Tracks when each carer is due, books it, and pulls together the recent feedback and observations for the supervisor to prepare from.
The supervision. That is a conversation between two people.
Nobody starts with eleven. A plan usually puts two live in the first month and leaves the rest ranked and waiting, so when you have the appetite for the next one you already know which it is.
Most of the job is joining up the systems you pay for rather than moving you off them. These are the ones we come across most in care, and we have no affiliation with any of them.
Three steps. You do the talking on the first one, and nothing is committed until you have seen what we found.
No prep, no agenda to fill in. We ask the questions and you walk us through how your week actually runs: the jobs, the tools, the emails you send a dozen times a month.
Recorded and written up, so you never repeat yourself.
We work back through the call and map where your time actually goes. Then we find the automations that suit your tools, your team and your budget, ordered so the biggest time saving comes first.
Back with you within a week.
We walk you through the whole report, recommendation by recommendation, and you decide what to take on first. Most people have their first automation running within a week of that call.
The report is yours to keep either way.
The plan tells you what to build. The dashboard shows you what it is doing once it is built, so you can see what you are getting back without asking us.
Set up when the plan is delivered, at app.fewerhours.com under your business name. No shared login and nothing to install.
Every one we build reports the hours it saved and the work it handled, so the value is a number you can check rather than a promise we made.
The rest of the ranked list sits there waiting. When you have the appetite for the next one, you already know which it is.
This works best where the registered manager can still see the whole service. There are a few cases where it would waste your time, and those are worth saying out loud.
Fewer Hours exists because too many owners knew AI could help them somewhere and had no way of telling a good idea from a sales pitch. The plan is the boring part done properly: sitting with the real workflow and working out which jobs are worth handing over.
Whoever takes your call is the person who writes your plan. No account manager, no junior doing the analysis, and nobody trying to move you onto a retainer at the end of it.
Three steps, and you can stop after any of them. The first one is a conversation, and nothing about it commits you to the next.
A short chat about how your business runs. If there’s nothing here worth mapping, we’ll say so on the call.
The full job. We map the workflows, score every candidate, and hand over the ranked list and the 30-day plan.
If you’d rather we built the projects than just planned them, we’ll do the ones the audit put first. Anything from a quick win to a full agent build.
If there are fewer than five of you and admin takes about an hour a day, there probably isn’t enough here to be worth mapping, and we’ll say so. If you already know exactly which job you want automated, skip the audit and just ask us to build it. And if your processes only exist in your head, we’ll tell you to go and write them down first.
If yours is not here, ask on the call. It is twenty minutes about how the service runs, not a pitch.
No, and that is not a soft no. Nothing we recommend writes a care plan, records a clinical observation, administers or signs for medication, or makes a safeguarding judgement. Every automation on the list is administrative, and the plan states on each one what stays with a named person.
The registered manager remains accountable for everything, exactly as now. What the plan does is make the evidence easier to produce, because most providers are delivering good care and struggling to assemble the proof. Where an automation touches anything a regulator would look at, it produces a draft for a person to approve rather than acting on its own.
Every recommendation states what data it touches and where that data ends up. With care records the default is stricter than elsewhere: personal and health data stays inside systems you already control, and anything that would move it is flagged with the alternative before it reaches the plan. Some jobs get ruled out on this basis and the plan says which.
That is one of the first things we check. Some of it is the API, some is a feature your system already ships and nobody switched on, and some is email and a shared sheet joined up properly. Where your system will not do something, the plan says so rather than pretending.
It is the highest-value automation on most care plans, because it happens daily, under time pressure, and it is pure matching: who is free, who is trained, who can get there. What it does not do is override continuity. If sending an unfamiliar carer to someone is a problem, it flags that for the coordinator rather than solving the gap and creating a worse one.
Then the plan should not need them to. The highest-value work here sits in the office, on the coordinator's and manager's day. If a recommendation depends on changing what carers do on their rounds, we say so plainly, because that is the thing most likely to fail.
Usually yes, because care admin repeats daily rather than monthly. A service with thirty carers generates more repeating coordination work than most businesses ten times its size.
The plan lands about two weeks after the call. Most providers have the first automation live within a week of that, because the first one is usually recruitment response or compliance tracking and neither goes near a care record.
The call takes twenty minutes and it is about how the service runs, not about software. The plan lands about two weeks later.