Release timing
Release 169 is scheduled for 2018-05-15 @ 6:00pm Eastern
The release will be available on your Preview environment this week, providing you the ability test the new features.
Upcoming Releases
We will use our release notes to publish the next 4 release dates to keep everyone 1/3 of a year informed.
- May 29th
- June 19th
- July 17th
- August 14th
- September 11th
Webinar Recording
https://zoom.us/recording/share/Ok8wU48_Vn7j4h7uwv92W2zEeyGBo6XJP-dWsmMYTiCwIumekTziMw
Intro Note
This month's release is huge! We've introduced so many new features and enhancements:
- Budget module
- Balances and Transactions
- Multi clock-in
- Care Time
- Travel Time in the Employee Finder Calendar
- Premiums by user role
- Improved French Translations
- Folders structure in Data Exploration
...and many more!
For further information, don't hesitate to contact your Client Success Manager.
French Translations
This month, we've continued to improve the French version of AlayaCare. We are glad to announce that we now have a fully translated platform, with very few improvements left.
Merci à tous nos clients francophones!
Coordination
Multi clock-in
By default in AlayaCare, Care Workers can only clock into 1 visit or service at a time. This said, some scenarios may required users to be able to clock into multiple visits or services at the same time. This functionality can now be enabled on a user role basis, giving them the ability to clock into multiple visits concurrently on web and mobile.
On the visit dialog or service report page, you will now see new 'Clock in' or 'Clock out' buttons. If the care worker or one of their colleagues is clocked into the visit already, they will now see a clock out button, instead of the previous clock-in button and warning.
Upon hovering the clock out button, they can now visualize the work session(s) that will be closed by pressing the button, giving them better oversight and context.
Important note: When multi clock-in functionality is enabled, some IVR (Interactive Voice Response) features are disabled.
To learn more about Multi clock-in, see here.
Care Time
Care Time is a feature that applies well to certain types of agencies. When a visit or appointment requires an employee's full attention only for a fraction of the visit, the Care Time feature allows you to distinguish required time of care from the total visit duration. Injection Clinics are a good example.
Care Time can be visualized in the following views:
- Calendars
- Visit/Recurrence dialog
- Visit summary
- Finder Calendar
Care time is set at the Service Code level along side Duration. This can be used to indicate to schedulers the time dedicated for care and prevent unwanted overlaps.
Care Time functionality is disabled by default. You can enable via the setting 'Care Time Different Than Duration' which can be found in System Settings>Scheduling.
Once this setting is is enabled, a new field will appear in the Service Code creation and edit dialogs:
Once set, all related visits with Care Time specified will display it in the views listed above. Here are two examples:
- On the left visit: Care Time is not set for Service code 'PT', so it is equal to visit duration
- On the right visit: Care Time 30 mins in a nearly 2 hour long visit.
To learn more about Care Time, see here.
Travel Time in the Employee Finder Calendar
Following the introduction of Travel Time in the Employee Finder Metrics tab last month, we've added the same feature in the Calendar tab. This gives schedulers complete visibility regarding the travel time by car required by Care Workers to get from one visit to one being scheduled. This includes traffic at that specific time.
Simply toggle on 'Display travel time' in the Calendar, which will display an additional tile type surrounding the visits being scheduled, representing Travel Time.
This allows schedulers to visually determine if the employee will have enough time to travel from the previous visit (or home) to the visit being scheduled, and from this one to the next scheduled visit. If travel time overlaps with the previous or following visit, that employee would not have enough travel time to make it on time.
To learn more about Travel Time, see here.
Visit Premiums limited by user role
You can now limit which Visit Premiums can be seen by a specific role. In the premium creation/edit dialog, select only the roles you want accessing this specific Visit Premium. By default, all roles are given access to a Premium.
Increased character limit on Tags
Tags were previously limited to 15 characters. We've now increased this limit to 255 characters for improved experience and readability.
Service List improvements
- 'Status effective date' column has been added in all the new Services Lists, to show the effective date of the current Service status, as seen in the Status History tab in a service profile.
- 'My Client Services List' page has been updated so that default sort is Client name.
Employee in the Finder improvements
- In the Employee Finder, users can now filter by multiple Employees using an autocomplete multi-select feature.
- A legend was also added to the Calendar tab of the Employee Finder to explain tile colors and functionalities.
Activity Feed on the Dashboard
In revamping clock-in functionality, the Activity Feed on the Dashboard no longer shows a 'Time Clock' option. From now on, only mobile clock-ins can be viewed, from the 'All Events' option.
Accounting
Balances and Transactions
Far-reaching infrastructure changes have been made to how AlayaCare handles billing.
Principally, the billing is moving to an allocation system of credits (payments, credit notes, etc.) to outstanding debits (invoices). This will implement the following important improvements:
- Payments are applicable to multiple invoices as desired;
- Credit notes can be incurred by one invoice but then carried forward to lower the balance of another;
- Allocations can be reversed if a payment was applied to a wrong invoice;
- Client balance will be maintained per funder of the client's services, as well as balances of outstanding invoices and remaining unallocated payment quantities;
- Invoices cannot be accidentally overpaid;
- Invoice items cannot be credited for more than their value;
- Tax quantities are included as their own Liability entries in the subledger;
- Credit notes and Void transactions take tax quantities into account in the subledger;
- It is no longer possible to void an invoice which has already received payment, though it is possible to create a credit note for the whole value of the invoice, reduce the invoice balance to 0, and take any of the additional credit to be applied to another invoice;
- Invoices must be marked as Sent before credits are allocated to them, to ensure that corresponding Sale transactions have been posted;
- When transactions are created and a Posting Date is selected, the user will obtain a warning if they choose to backdate a transaction so that dates in the past are not chosen accidentally.
To learn more about Balances and Transactions in the client tab, see here.
CCAC Reconciliation Improvements
In conjunction with the above transaction structure refurbishment, there is now much more flexibility available for CCAC reconciliation in the Funder Summary.
- Payments are tracked per visit - a single payment, received for an RA file response, will be allocated according to quantities specified by the RA file for every visit
- The user will be able to see the balance of the visit and adjust accordingly with transactions of their choosing for that specific visit - ie, a credit note for an underpayment, a debit note for an overpayment, or a writeoff.
To learn more about CCAC Reconciliation, see here.
Custom AR Journal Reasons
For users who wish to configure their own journal reasons, it is possible to configure simple transactions in Accounting>Accounting Settings>AR Journal Reasons. These transactions all work according to the same model: the transaction is determined to be either a debit to a receivables account or a credit, and a secondary GL account is chosen for the accompanying bookkeeping entry. The custom transaction can be created for a funder and client and allocated according to whether it is a credit or a debit, as for all other transactions.
To learn more about Custom AR Journal Reasons, see here.
Statements
A simple statement can now be exported from the client's profile. The statement can be generated for a given date range and a single funder among the client's actual funders.
To learn more about statements, see here.
Client Budget
Budget Setup
The budget module allows you to define income vs expenses for a client. Incomes are grouped by Program with the ability to define your Sources, Supplements and Fees/Charges for each. Expenses are defined as Services, Fees, Premiums or Equipment/Supplies. The budget’s balance is derived from the Total Income less the Total Expenses.
You can create multiple version of a budget to present different care options to you client.
To learn more about budget setup, see here.
Budget Management
Once you have agreement from the client on a draft budget with a client, you can make it active by publishing it.
Publishing the budget will do the following:
- Set the status of the draft budget you're publishing to "Active"
- Set the status of any other draft budgets for this client to "Archived"
- Generate and update services for your client
- Generate and update client billing premiums for your client
Once a budget is active, you can copy it and edit this copy, then publish it again so the changes are propagated to the clients services and billing premiums.
To learn more about budget management, see here.
Budget Templates
If most of your client budgets will use a common base, you can define budget templates that will auto-populate new client budgets.
Data Exploration
We have done some exciting clean up in our Data Exploration module!
When you go into Data Exploration you may notice the first change right away the order of your categories has been revamped, there is a new folder type – My Reports and finally we’ve built out the ability for you to create folders!
Agency Reports – will function the same way that it has in the past. These are reports that your organization has access to based on the specific Roles and Permissions ‘Cube’ access your staff has in the system.
My Reports – is your personal folder of reports that only you can see.
AlayaCare Reports – will function the same way it has in the past. This is our pre-canned group of reports based on common requests
Feature Updates:
1. Your reports will now be saved in alphanumeric order
2. To create a folder select the Folder icon in the corresponding Agency Reports or My Reports section.
This will bring you into a folder creation page. If this is the first folder you have built simply choose a Folder Name and select create! If you have gone ahead and already created folders you will have the ability to choose a Parent Folder making your newly created Folder name a sub folder.
3. To create a report choose whether this is for your team (Agency Reports) or yourself (My Reports) and then select the corresponding Paper Icon to begin.
Enter in a File Name and choose the Report Type (in the past called ‘Cube’) and select Create.
Note: You will notice you can choose to have this report appear in a Parent folder if you wish.
Now get building out your report like you have in the past!
4. To make changes to a report or folder hover over the name and a three dot editor icon will appear.
Select the editor icon and whether you are looking to rename, move or delete the file or folder.
When moving an item the folder options in that report section will appear. Select the folder and click Move
When renaming a file or folder, change the detail of the naming convention and to save it select Enter on your keyboard. To cancel the edit click anywhere else on the screen.