Home Care Software Prices in 2024: Your Complete Guide

1. Back Office Licensing  

Some home care software prices are dictated solely by the number of back office user licenses you require (see definition of user/license types above). This is referred to as Back Office Licensing.  

Beware, beware the license share 

The temptation you may face with Back Office Licensing is to share licenses between staff to keep costs lower, rather than each back office user having their own login. So while you have, for example ten back office staff you only buy five licenses, giving you five logins for ten staff members. 

While this may seem savvy, it is not something care providers will stick with for long. Software providers often have ways to prevent multiple logins on one license at the same time. This can leave one or more users waiting while the person currently logged in completes their tasks.  

This can increase risk and if you share licenses you lose your accurate audit trail as you have no idea of who actually did what and when. Not a great situation if an incident occurs, or something to show off during an inspection by your regulator. 

Sharing licenses can slow your back office processes down and reduce the responsiveness of your care service, which is exactly the opposite outcome you want from buying domiciliary care software. It will also leave your coordinators and managers frustrated and can make them less likely to ‘buy-in’ to the software you’ve just implemented. 

Where back office licensing is a good fit

If you are using licenses correctly, then a back office pricing model could work for you, if you deliver specific types of care services.  

Back office licenses are best suited towards those care settings where you may have more care workers ‘on your books’ than are actually working, for example in care staffing agencies.  

Alternatively in supported living or more complex care services, where the number of care staff or support workers are lower and there are more people that need access to the full functionality of the system. In these cases you can usually negotiate a competitive pricing structure with the supplier if they don’t have an existing one for services like yours.  

2. Per Carer – Standard Pricing Model  

The most commonly used pricing model for home care software is based on purchasing licenses for the number of care workers that you employ. As noted above these licenses have a lower cost per license but greater volume.  

Sometimes these are purchased individually i.e. you pay per care worker. Other suppliers prefer to charge for licenses in bundles or bands, where you pay a certain amount that gives you access to X number of licenses, once you pass that threshold you are into the next band and pay a higher fee per month.  

With the Per Carer model, back office licenses will often be included for free or priced much lower than in a Back Office Licensing model.  

The advantage of the per carer model is you can more easily budget based on how the size of your business as the number of care workers you need should not decrease greatly. That said, you should still bear in mind factors that could reduce your staff numbers, for example if you don't think you will win that tender again and may lose the contract. 

On the other hand if you were using the Back Office Licensing model and lost a care coordinator or registered manager, you would be paying out of pocket for a spare license until you replaced them, which would be a much greater cost to your business. 

Different companies offer different incentives for care providers of different sizes. If you are small, or brand new start up, then you could benefit from lower rates, or discounts such as those included in Access Care Foundations. 

However, larger businesses purchasing a large number of licenses will often be able to negotiate a scaled down pricing per care worker. 

Per Carer pricing is a good fit for most domiciliary care providers, where the ratio of care workers to back office staff is very high. It is not a good fit for staffing agencies, where the number of care workers ‘on the books’ can be significantly higher than those actually working at any one time, or supported living providers where the ratio of care workers to back office staff is much closer.  

It’s important to note that the care worker model is inelastic. This means that if a business is paying for 90 people and they lose 20 staff, they will still have to pay for the 90 that they started off with. However, if the home care business is stable and has good staff retention, then this shouldn’t be too much of a concern.  

3. Per Service User  

Like the per carer model, the per-service user model is based on an evaluation of the size of your care business. This will make the cost justifiable and will ensure that the system is orientated around your clients. You know how many service users your business has, which will make pricing quick and easy to work out. Larger companies often get a better price on their per-service user models.  

The pros of this model is that it’s a simple pricing model that’s easy to calculate. It’s also good for care staffing agencies that may have fewer or variable numbers of staff working at a time.  

The drawbacks of this model is that the number of service users in a home care service will often fluctuate much more drastically than the net number of care staff. If the pricing model is inelastic, as it typically is regardless of supplier, it will mean you end up paying for service users you are not actually caring for. 
 

You may find yourself having a conversation with two different home care software suppliers, reviewing each of their systems and think, these both basically do the same job, why is one so much more expensive? 

It’s true that the more expensive company may just be off the mark in terms of what prices are competitive. But what is more often true is that compared to the cheaper product, the pricier software does have added benefits, or fewer flaws that you need to look a little deeper to see. 

Below you can see some of the key factors in terms of the products, the software itself that differentiates the cheap from the more expensive and why this will matter for you and your care service.  

These are based on research and what we’ve heard from the thousands of home care providers we have talked to in recent years.

Depth and quality of functionality  

In the case of differences between what the system can actually do, a simple, cheap rostering system may lack some or all of the following: 

• Automated invoicing based on the number of care hours completed for that funder 
• Mapping tools to reduce travel time and accurately pay staff (factoring in travel) 
• Applicant tracking to improve recruitment of staff 
• The ability to handle variable carer pay and funder bill rates 
• Robust integration with a care planning system 

More expensive ‘higher end’ rostering systems will usually have this functionality included. 

What this means in practice is that with most cheaper systems you will soon encounter situations where the rostering system comes unstuck. It cannot handle as much variety or complexity as more well-developed, and typically more expensive systems.  

Variety here can mean different care settings, different pay/charging rates, or even if you are a larger provider with multiple branches in different locations, the cheaper systems may not be able to deal with those branches separately, which can become messy and difficult to manage.

Automation 

The higher end of home care software typically does a lot more to automate the processes, and the steps in those processes, that you use in your home care business.  

In care planning and delivering care, this can include new and updated assessments automatically feeding information into care plans, or an automated alert and tasks to follow up, or investigate when an incident is recorded.  

On the business operations side of things, this could include automatically reconciling payroll information using actual hours, travel time, differing pay rates and so on.   

Automating these processes saves more time for your staff and ensures that the ball doesn’t get dropped. 

The point here is that you don’t just use the software to do things more quickly, the software starts to do things for you. Typically, less expensive software will do less of this.  

What this means in practice is you may end up with more admin or a kind of halfway house between a paperless system and paper records or paper based, manual processes.  

So when weighing up cost, try and bear these things in mind, that a system that costs less may also save you less in terms of time, hours worked and actual costs from stationery, postage, printing and so on.
 

Flexibility/customisation 

Just as cheaper systems often lack the ability to ‘handle’ different types of scenarios (such as variable pay rates) they also often have a lack of flexibility.  

When it comes to care planning, this means you may be stuck with a fairly rigid ‘out of the box’ set of templates for your assessments, care plans, forms and so on. You end up adapting to the system rather than the system fitting to suit you and the way your care service operates.  

Meanwhile more expensive systems typically start with an out of the box setup, which you can then modify to suit your specific needs, the documents your care service has perfected over time and so on.  

In the most advanced systems, even the workflow automation, alerts and other features can all be customised to fit the way you want your care service to work, rather than being limited by the software you use.