HZCare makes rate management as simple as possible, while giving you enough options to cover any possible rate structure your business might use. Sure, you’ve got separate rates for hourly and live-in caregivers, but some agencies and registries require more granularity than others. Do all your certified caregivers earn the same rate, or do they vary depending on the caregiver? Maybe they differ based on the client. Are your caregivers classified as independent contractors and negotiate their own rates? There are a lot of possibilities so let’s get started!
Employees vs. Independent Contractors
If you’re an agency whose caregivers are employees, you probably receive a payment from the client, and then pay a cut to the caregiver who worked the appointment. For registries whose caregivers are independent contractors, the client may pay you and the caregiver separately. HZCare is equipped to handle either of those models, and we’ll onboard you with the appropriate settings for your business.
Regardless of which model you use, HZCare still keeps track of the office charge and caregiver charge throughout the app. Even if the caregiver charges never route through your business, you can still provide caregivers with 1099s and other reports that track their earnings. The big difference for you is whether the invoices include the caregiver charge or not.
Billing on Overnight Appointments
When an appointment spans two different days, some agencies prefer to bill on the first day, while others prefer to bill on the second day. Some might even handle hourly appointments one way and live-in appointments the other. Whichever approach your business takes, you can manage this in the Admin Section under Branches. Select your branch and look for the option to Bill Hourly Overnight Appointments on First Day. Directly under that setting, you’ll see Bill Live-In Overnight Appointments on First Day. Set them to First or Second as you see fit.
Holidays
Your caregivers might expect to earn a premium on holidays, and you can handle that in the Admin Section as well. Click on Holidays, and you’ll find the Caregiver Multiplier and Office Multiplier at the top of the page. If you want to increase both rates 50% for holidays, you would enter 1.5 in each field, then click the Update Multipliers button. If you click the Add button, you can add more holidays to the calendar. Please note that holidays are specific to each branch, so if you’re managing multiple branches you’ll need to add them for each branch (assuming each branch wants to recognize the same holidays). Also note that hourly overnight appointments will only apply the holiday multiplier to the hours that are in the holiday, while live-in appointments will get the full holiday multiplier if they are billed on the holiday.
Caregiver Categories
Certified caregivers and companion caregivers might get different rates in your market. In the Admin section, go to Caregiver Categories. Click the Add button to add a new category. When you first set-up a category, you get to set the hourly office and caregiver rates, as well as the live-in office and caregiver rates. Remember that live-in rates are the charge for the entire 24 hour period, not the hourly rate. If you’ve already created a category and want to edit the rates on it, you can do that in the Accounting section on the Rate Management tab. Click on the Default Rates tab, and you’ll find the hourly and live-in rates for all of the caregiver categories. You’ll also see variations on the hourly rates for appointments lasting less than certain hourly thresholds. You might want to charge a higher hourly rate for shorter appointments. We’ll discuss how to set-up those thresholds in just a moment.
Conflicting Caregiver Categories
What happens when a certified caregiver works an appointment where the client needs a companion caregiver? Sometimes these conflicts arise, and different agencies want to handle them differently. Go to the Accounting Section and click on the Rate Management tab. The Branch Settings tab starts off with precisely this issue. If you want the prevailing rate to be the category you set-up on the appointment, choose Client Based for the Rate Setting. Conversely, choose Caregiver Based if you want the rate to derive from the caregiver’s category.
Weekend Rates
Scrolling down the Branch Settings tab, you’ll find a combination of options for adjusting weekend rates. For both hourly and live-in rates, you can choose whether you want to make them the same as weekday rates, or adjust them by a fixed or percentage amount. You can manage the caregiver and office components separately as well.
Hourly Thresholds for Short Appointments
For hourly appointments that are below a specific hourly threshold, you may want to set a different rate. At the bottom of the Branch Settings tab, you can specify any thresholds that you want to set. Flip any of the switches you like, then head to the Default Rates tab. In addition to the Hourly Standard rate for all of your caregiver categories, you’ll now have the option to set rates for those hourly thresholds.
Custom Client and Caregiver Rates
The final two tabs under Rate Management, Clients and Caregivers, let you set unique rates for clients and caregivers, respectively. Only one of those tabs will be usable at a time, based on whether you set your branch to use Client or Caregiver based rates on the Branch Settings tab. Assuming your branch’s rate setting is Client Based, the Clients tab will have a list of all your clients. Click on one, and you’ll have tabs for Client Rates and Orientation Rates. The Client Rates tab lets you customize the office and caregiver rate for hourly and live-in appointments, as well as any hourly thresholds. These settings will take priority over anything set previously at the branch level for caregiver categories. You can also set them to Default, which will fallback to the branch level settings from earlier. The Orientation Rates tab lets you get even more granular by setting rates for specific caregivers that this client uses. These rates have even higher priority than the Client Rates tab.
Custom Appointment Rates
Even though HZCare gives you all of these options to standardize rates so you don’t have to think about them while scheduling appointments, sometimes there’s going to be an appointment that simply requires a unique rate. When those circumstances arise, we’ve got you covered! In the Schedule section, click on the appointment in question. You’ll see a switch to Add Custom Rate. Turn it on, and add the caregiver and office rates. These rates will have priority over all of the other settings.
Final Thoughts
There’s a lot of possibilities for managing rates, and odds are you won’t need all of it. Maybe your branch is highly standardized. You’ll just set-up the initial settings on your branch in the Admin section, and update your default rates in the Rate Management tab of the Accounting section every so often. If your caregivers negotiate their own rates, you probably don’t care much about caregiver category rates, and you’ll lean heavily on the custom client and caregiver rates instead. Either way, HZCare simplifies the process as much as possible to help optimize your day!