Sleepover Billing & Payroll

Sleepover Billing & Payroll

Overview

CareVision provides support for scheduling, tracking, billing, and paying sleepover bookings. A sleepover booking is a booking during which the staff member may sleep when they are not working.

Key terminology / concepts

  1. Sleep Period - The time period where a staff member is able to sleep if they are not required to work. A single booking can only have a single sleep period.
  2. Interruptions - Time periods during the sleep period where the staff member was woken and required to work. These are also sometimes called "recalls".
  3. Active Time - Time during the booking which is outside of any sleep period. For non-sleepover bookings this is the entire booking duration. For sleepover bookings this is any time before or after the sleep period. This does not include interruptions, Active Time in CareVision only refers to times where the staff member was never expected to sleep.
  4. Planned/Scheduled - These terms refer to the details which are entered on the booking by scheduling staff, usually before the booking is delivered.
  5. Actual - This refers to details which were recorded by the field staff member during or after delivery of the service.
  6. Manual - This refers to details which have been entered as overrides for billing or payroll.

Sleepover Billing Categories

Sleepover Billing Categories are created the same way as any other type of billing category. They support all the standard billing category functionality, such as multiple Rate Set versions and client group treatments. These will be explained in other articles.
A Sleepover Rate Set has two main sections:

Sleepover Categories

The "Sleepover Categories" section of the Rate Set defines rules for how Sleep Periods should be billed and paid. These rules are sometimes referred to as "Sleepover Allowances".

Unit

The main "Unit" dropdown for the Rate Set (which appears immediately above the "Sleepover Categories" section) is used to determine how to bill for Sleep Periods. Currently two values are supported:
  1. Per Booking - A flat rate charged for each sleepover.
  2. Hour - Billed based on the duration of the Sleep Period. This does not include Active Time, nor is time deducted for Interruptions. E.g. if there's a 12 hour Booking which contains an 8 hour Sleep Period and a 1 hour Interruption, the Sleepover Category will be billed with a quantity of 8.

Conditions & Multiple Sleepover Categories

In a single rate set you can add multiple Sleepover Categories. During billing, a single Sleepover Category will be applied to the booking. The system follows the following rules when choosing which Sleepover Category to apply:
  1. If the Sleepover Category has one or more States specified, the state of the booking's Start Location must match one of the specified states. If no States are specified on the Sleepover Category, it will match bookings from any state.
  2. If the Sleepover Category has one or more Time Categories specified, the booking must match at least one of the specified time categories. (This will be explained in more detail in the article for Time Category Billing Categories.) If no Time Categories are specified, the Sleepover Category will match bookings at any time. 
  3. If multiple Sleepover Categories can be applied to the booking based on the above conditions, the matching Sleepover Category with the Duration value closest to the booking's Sleep Period duration will be applied.
  4. If multiple Sleepover Categories match the above conditions and have equidistant duration values, the closest Start Time value will be used as a tiebreaker.
  5. If multiple Sleepover Categories match the above conditions and have equidistant duration & start time values, the order of the Sleepover Categories within the Rate Set will be used as a tiebreaker.
  6. If no Sleepover Category matches the booking, the Sleep Period will not be billed or paid.
To summarise, "State" and "Time Category" are hard filters if specified. "Duration", "Start Time", and the definition order are tie-breakers, in that order of precedence.
Time Categories are matched based on the start/end time of the Booking, not the start/end time of the Sleep Period.
Duration must be specified in minutes, regardless of the selected Unit.

Parameters

Once the system has found the best matching Sleepover Category, several parameters from the selected Sleepover Category will be applied in order to determine how the Sleep Period should be billed and paid:
  1. Rate - The rate which will be used to bill for the Sleep Period. Note that this is based on the "Unit" selected above.
  2. Fixed Duration - This box only has an effect when using a duration-based Unit. If "Fixed Duration" is enabled, the Sleep Period will be billed based on the duration specified on the matched Sleepover Category. If "Fixed Duration" is disabled, the Sleep Period will be billed based on the scheduled/actual/manual duration.
  3. References - The references section can be used to refer to entities in external systems. For more details, please read Reference Values.

Interruptions

The "Interruptions" section of the Rate Set defines rules for how Interruptions should be billed and paid.
There are several steps in the process for billing interruptions:
  1. Combination & transformation
  2. Totalling & arithmetic
  3. Rate Rule selection
  4. Bracket application
Payroll is handled somewhat differently, and will be explained later.

Unit

Interruptions can (and frequently are) billed in different units to the Sleep Period. At the top of the Interruptions section there's a Unit dropdown, this applies to all Interruption calculations.
Round To Multiple Of, Minimum, Maximum are all specified based on the selected Unit. E.g. if Minimum is 60 and Unit is "Minute", the minimum duration is 60 minutes. But if Minimum is 60 and Unit is "Hour", the minimum duration is 60 hours. (Probably not what you want)
On each bracket, From is also specified in the selected Unit. The generated invoice lines will have quantities based on the Unit as well.

Combination & transformation

The combination process allows for multiple short Interruptions to be merged into larger Interruption Periods. This can be used to produce simpler and fairer billing. The transformation process allows for controlling certain parameters about the resulting Interruption Periods.
Several strategies are available for combination & transformation:
None
Interruptions will not be billed.
Individual
A separate Interruption Period will be generated for each Interruption. If "Minimum" is specified, interruptions shorter than the minimum duration will be extended to meet the minimum duration.
If you use Individual with a minimum duration, and multiple Interruptions occur within the minimum duration of each other, this can result in billing for overlapping times.
For example, if minimum duration is 1 hour and there's an interruption from 01:00 - 01:05 and another interruption from 01:25 - 01:35, the client will be billed for 2 hours.
Longest Gap
Longest Gap searches the booking for the longest gap between Interruptions. In other words, the longest period of uninterrupted sleep. Longest Gap will then create Interruption Periods for all time during the Sleep Period outside of the selected gap. At most this will generate two Interruption Periods (one from the start of the booking to the start of the gap, and one from the end of the gap to the end of the booking). If either of these Interruption Periods is shorter than the minimum duration, the minimum duration will be applied.
If a resulting Interruption Period has a duration of 0, the minimum duration will NOT be applied.
Merge
The merge strategy will find Interruption Periods which have the minimum possible total duration while meeting the following conditions:
  1. The generated Interruption Periods must completely cover all Interruptions.
  2. Each generated Interruption Period must have a duration equal to or longer than the specified Minimum.
This diagram illustrates the differences in how each strategy processes interruptions. Note that in this diagram each major gridline represents 30 minutes, and each minor gridline represents 7.5 minutes.

Totalling & arithmetic

For the "individual" mode, the invoice will contain separate line items for each Interruption Period. For all other modes, the invoice will contain a single line item with the total duration of all Interruption Periods.

Once any totalling has been performed, rounding rules are applied based on the specified Round To Multiple Of and Round Behaviour values.
E.g. if Unit is "Minute", Round To Multiple Of is "5", and Round Behaviour is "Up", 41 minutes of Interruptions would be rounded to 45 minutes.
In "individual" mode, rounding is applied separately to each Interruption Period. In all other modes, rounding is applied to the total duration of all Interruption Periods.

Next the "Maximum" value is applied. If the total duration of interruptions is larger than the Maximum duration, it will be clamped to equal the Maximum duration.
"Maximum" is always applied based on the total duration of all Interruption Periods, even in "individual" mode. If the total duration of Interruption Periods is larger than the Maximum duration in "individual" mode, time will be deducted from the last Interruption Period. If the last Interruption Period reaches a duration of 0 and the Maximum duration is still exceeded, time will be deducted from the second-to-last Interruption Period, and so on until the total duration matches the Maximum duration. Interruption Periods with a resulting duration of 0 will be discarded and will not appear on the invoice.
Minimum is applied separately to each Interruption Period, while Maximum is applied once to the total of all Interruption Periods.

Rate Rule selection

A Sleepover Rate Set can include multiple Rate Rules. A single Rate Rule will be applied per booking. To determine which Rate Rule to apply, the system will check each Rate Rule in the order that they are specified, and apply the first matching Rate Rule.
A Rate Rule is considered to match if the booking matches any of the specified Time Categories. If no Time Categories are specified, the Rate Rule will always match.

Bracket application

Finally, the interruptions are added to the invoice using a progressive bracketing system. A progressive bracketing system that you might already be familiar with is Australian income taxes. You can define multiple rates, as well as a quantity range for each rate. Each rate will be applied to minutes/hours which fall within its range.
For example, let's say you have the following brackets:
0-2 hours - $0
2-3 hours - $80
3-∞ hours - $100
If the interruption duration is 5.4 hours, the following line items will be generated:
2 hours @ $0 per hour (will not appear on invoice due to $0 rate)
1 hour @ $80 per hour
2.4 hours @ $100 per hour

In "individual" mode, brackets are applied separately for each Interruption Period. In all other modes, brackets are applied to the total. 

Payroll

The Payroll Metrics integration largely follows the same process for interruptions as billing, but ignores many of the parameters from the Billing Category:
  1. Payroll Metrics ignores the "mode" and "minimum" specified on the Billing Category. Instead it uses the "Sleepover Rules" option specified in the organisation's general config.
    Option 1 - Interruptions will be ignored, and the total interruption duration will be based on the specified fixed amount of time
    Option 2 - Longest Gap
    Option 3 - Merge, with a minimum duration of 1 hour
  2. Payroll Metrics ignores rounding and maximum options specified on the Billing Category.
  3. Payroll Metrics DOES use the Rate Rule selection on the Billing Category in order to determine which references should be applied. In particular, Ref 15 of the Rate Rule is used to determine the Pay Element to use for the interruptions.
  4. If no Rate Rule is matched, or the matched Rate Rule does not have anything specified in Ref 15, Ref 1 from the Option 3 section will be used to determine the Pay Element.
  5. If Ref 1 also does not have a value, then the interruptions will not be paid.
  6. The Payroll Metrics integration does NOT apply any bracketing. But when using Option 3, an option is available to ignore the first few hours of interruptions.

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