From spreadsheets and memory to one system

Two independent supported housing providers, each running several properties and together managing around 100 rooms. Their work combines accommodation with support. Residents arrive from a waiting list, move into a room, have risk assessments and care plans, are checked on regularly and eventually move on. Behind that sit property checks, cleaning, maintenance, incidents, documents and the money.

None of that lived in one place. Resident records sat in one set of documents, risk assessments followed another process, care plans another, room and property checks were somewhere else, and the tasks connecting them lived in people’s heads. Policies were in folders. Vacancies and the waiting list were coordinated by hand.

Two things suffered. Support workers spent a large share of their time on administration: writing up the same information more than once, preparing documents and working out what needed to happen next. And directors could not see what was happening across their properties without ringing staff or driving over. A vacant room could sit empty while the paperwork for the next resident caught up.

We mapped the real operation, from a name on the waiting list to a resident moving on, and built a platform around it rather than fitting the organisations to a generic system.

Residents, properties and rooms are the spine. Each resident has one record: accommodation history, contacts, risk assessments, care plans and reviews, goals, wellbeing over time, documents and tasks. Each room shows whether it is occupied or vacant, who is due to move in, its condition from the latest check and any open issues. The waiting list is joined to room availability, so a vacant room can be matched to someone waiting and a future move planned before the current resident has left.

Routine work is automated where it should be. Assigning a room creates the risk assessment task. Recording a property check closes the task that asked for it. Regular resident checks are scheduled by the system rather than remembered by a person. Risk assessments, care plans and licence documents are generated from the information already held, with signatures captured, instead of being typed up again.

Support workers also have an assistant that answers questions from the organisation’s own policies. It answers from the organisation’s approved policy documents, shows the source for each answer, and has checks designed to limit unsupported answers. It helps staff find the right procedure quickly. It does not make the decision for them.

Directors have dashboards across every property: who is accommodated, who is waiting, open tasks, incidents, checks and the condition of rooms. The platform is deployed separately for each organisation, with its own templates and configuration, and has kept developing since it went live.

Both organisations run on the platform day to day. The clearest result is in room turnaround. Before, a room sat empty for around 15 days between one resident leaving and the next moving in. With room condition, cleaning, the waiting list and the move-in tasks joined up, that is now around 5 days: two-thirds less time empty, which matters to the people waiting and to the organisations’ income.

Administration has fallen too. Each organisation puts the time released from risk assessments, care plans, reviews, repeated data entry and document preparation at about one support worker’s role. On a £25,000 salary with 20% added for employment costs, that is around £30,000 a year of capacity per organisation returned to support work. It is released time rather than a cash saving, and it goes where it should: on the people the organisations exist to support.

Directors can now see across their properties from wherever they are. Visits still happen; they are no longer the only way to know what is going on.