How Multiple Pay Rates Work
Nursebuddy's advanced settings allow healthcare professionals to easily create different pay rates to properly attribute the cost to the products and services provided during each visit or set of visits.
you can set unique costs per visit or allocate specific hourly rates for every product in your database. This ensures your payroll is always accurate, no matter how varied your services are.
The following sections will explain how to use the multiple pay rate feature in Nursebuddy.
Step-by-Step: Creating Your Pay Rate Plans
To get started, navigate to Settings > Payroll. Here you can see your existing plans or start fresh by clicking the + Add new rate plan button.
š©āš« Nursebuddy tip! Make your life easier by using clear names for your plans, such as "Senior Rate," "Night Worker Rate," or "Trainee Rate." This makes it much more intuitive when assigning them to carers later!
2. Set your preferences in every rate plan, Decide if you want to pay based on Planned times (the rota) or Actual times (what the carer reported in the app).
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āTravel & Commuting: Tick the boxes if you pay for the commute (to/from home). You can also set a "break time" limitāif the gap between visits is longer than this, the system won't calculate mileage for that specific trip.
3. Step 3: Adding Rates and Products: Now that the structure is ready, you can dive in to add specific hourly rates and link them to your different care products.
Default Rate
Think of the Default Rate as your "catch-all." If a visit doesn't fall into a specific weekend or night-time category, Nursebuddy will use this rate to ensure the carer is still paid. By default, this rate is 10Ā£/ā¬ per hour, but you can easily change it by clicking on it:
Adding Specific Rates (Weekends & Nights)
Ready to get more specific? Click + Add new rate to defaults to layer in higher pay for those unsociable hours or busy periods.
When you add a new rate, it takes priority over the default. You can tell the system exactly which days (like Saturdays and Sundays) and which times (like 10 PM to 6 AM) this higher rate should apply.
Example 1
I have a rate plan for those new carers with less than one year of experience. They are paid a flat rate of 12Ā£ per hour but if they are required to work during the weekend they will be paid 15Ā£ per hour. We pay mileage (drivers) or travel time (walkers/cyclists) between visits but we don't pay for distances traveled between carer's houses to client's houses or vice versa. Bank holidays are paid double (weekday rates).
Weekday pay rates:
Weekends pay rate:
Bank Holidays:
The Pay Rate plan now:
If there is a visit scheduled after 8:00 pm the system will use the default rate to calculate the hourly price because there are not rates that cover any time after 8:00 pm in this example.
These rates will be applied automatically to all the carers with completed visits that have this rate plan assigned.
Important: the Payroll module doesn't work with visits that haven't been checked in or checked out - Remind your carers to do this!
Linking Staff to Rate Plans
For the payroll magic to work, the system needs to know which rules apply to which carer. By assigning a plan, Nursebuddy knows exactly which hourly rates and travel rules to use for every visit they complete.
Navigate to Settings > Payroll and click "Assign rate plans for carers." Youāll see a list of your entire team where you can match them with the correct plan in seconds.
In the image below, carer James Brown has been assigned the senior Rate Plan.
From now onwards, the system will use the default rates to assign automatically a price to their worked hours and if she has been assigned to Dementia Care visits, the Dementia Care rate included in the Junior Rate Plan will be applied in the payroll for that visit.
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Editing an Existing Pay Rate
To edit an existing pay rate plan you just need to open it from your Payroll settings.
Use Edit Settings for high-level changes (like switching from planned to actual hours). To change prices or specific travel rates for certain times of the day, just click on the individual rate line itself.
Deleting a Pay Rate
If a rate plan is no longer neededāperhaps after a company restructureāyou can remove it entirely. Just click the Delete rate plan button in the top right corner of the plan's page. If what you want to do is to delete the Product rates, use the button Delete Product Rates that you can find in each of your product rates added
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once youāve deleted a plan, pop over to the "Assign rate plans for carers" page. You want to make sure every single carer still has a plan linked to their name. If someone is left blank, they won't show up correctly in your payroll totals!
Product Pay Rates
Example 2
In my company we have a senior Pay Rate plan as above but, we pay different rates on certain types of visits. For example, to senior Carers, Dementia Care visits are paid 13Ā£ per hour during the week and 17Ā£ per hour during the weekend.
The button
+ Add a new set of product ratesin a rate plan will allow you to select how much you want to pay for determined visits
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2. Select "Dementia Care" (or any other service you've created) from the drop-down menu. You can link as many products as you like to these special rates.
**These products are the same that you have created in the Invoice module, i.e: Personal Care, Domestic Care, Enabling, Overnight, etc.
3. Here, youāll set your higher rates: Ā£13 for weekdays and Ā£17 for weekends. You can also set a specific double-pay rate for bank holidays here!
4. In the client's calendar you need to make sure that each visit or visit recurrence has the correct product added, this is how the system will know that for that specific visit a specific invoicing product has to be linked in invoicing and a specific pay rate has to be linked in the payroll report.