Every home care agency starts on a spreadsheet, and many good ones run on one for years. The problem is never the spreadsheet; it is the rota rules that nobody wrote into it. This free template is laid out around those rules: one row per call, carers and clients kept separately, a daily check for the office, and a travel log for pay. Download it, use it as long as it serves you, and read on for the point at which it stops.
It opens in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice. There are no macros and nothing hidden.
One carer, one place at a time. A carer cannot be on two calls that overlap, and travel between calls counts. The template puts start, end and minutes on every row so a clash is visible when you sort by carer.
Same faces. Clients do better with carers they know. The Clients sheet carries preferred carers so cover is chosen from the right short list.
A double-up is one call with two carers. Not two rows that drift apart. Both carers are paid for their own time on it.
Leave comes off the rota before it starts. A carer on approved holiday must not appear on calls that week, or your timesheets will later say they worked.
An empty carer cell is a cover need. Never guess a name to make the sheet look complete. Blank means someone has to be found, and that is useful information.
The reasoning behind each rule is in our rota planning guide.
Fill the Carers and Clients sheets first; the rota is only as good as the lists behind it. Then build Monday from each client's calls per day, give each call its usual carer, and copy Monday across the week before changing the days that differ. Sort the Week rota by carer and read down the start and end times: any overlap, allowing for travel, is a clash to fix now rather than at seven in the morning. Save the week as a copy with the date in the tab name, so last week is always there to compare.
The daily check is the sheet most agencies skip and most regulators ask about. Each morning, copy today's calls into it. As carers confirm arrival, enter the time. A call with no arrival time fifteen minutes after its planned start is late, and the office rings the carer, then the client, then cover. By the end of the day the sheet is your record of what happened, including the calls that nearly did not. Keep them; a missed call with a written action taken is a very different thing from a missed call nobody noticed.
A spreadsheet is a plan. It cannot tell you a carer has not arrived, because it does not know where anyone is. It cannot stop a double booking, only show one if you look. It cannot put each carer's calls on their phone, so the rota is printed, photographed or read out, and changes after printing are lost. It cannot produce a timesheet from real arrival and departure times, so pay is based on the plan rather than the day. Most agencies hit these limits between fifteen and thirty carers, when the coordinator's day becomes phone calls about the sheet rather than care.
Every carer sees their own calls on their phone, and sees changes as you make them. Check-in at the door stamps the time and the place, so a late call shows itself while there is still time to act. A double booking cannot happen: moving a carer onto a clashing call sets the other aside for cover rather than leaving two names on it. Approved leave comes off the rota automatically, with the gap shown before you approve. Timesheets come from real hours, ready for payroll.
That is what Carelo's rota does, from £59 a month for up to fifteen carers with unlimited service users and both apps included. The template above is free either way; if it is all you need, use it with our blessing.
Yes. No email address, no sign-up. Download it and use it for as long as it serves your agency.
Yes. Upload the file to Google Drive and open it with Sheets. The minutes formula on the week rota works in both.
Add rows to the Carers and Clients sheets without limit. The Week rota has four spare rows per day; insert more wherever you need them.
Send us the sheet. We set up your carers, clients and weekly pattern from it as part of free migration, and you start the trial with the rota already in place.
It records what you planned and, with the daily check, what happened. Whether that satisfies a regulator depends on using it every day. A live system records it for you.
From £59 a month. Free migration from your sheet. Fourteen days free.
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