Case study · Care home staffing
A care home’s rota lived in a spreadsheet. We rebuilt it as a system.
How a fragmented monthly roster for a UK care home became one place to plan shifts, track staffing limits, and watch live wage costs.
Built by Alchemetryx · Real UK care home · Site and staff names anonymised
01 / The before
Five tabs, and a lot of trust.
The home planned every month in one shared Excel file. Five tabs, one per area. Staff were typed into a grid by hand, week after week stretched across ninety columns, and the file was updated whenever someone remembered.
No running cost
Nobody could see the wage bill against budget until the month was already spent.
No coverage check
Whether a floor was actually staffed for a shift was worked out by eye, row by row.
Leave lived in heads
Annual leave, maternity and sick sat in side notes and memory, not next to the rota they affected.
02 / The build
One system that understands a care home.
A scheduling system shaped around residential care home routines: floors, bank staff, statutory leave, and live running budgets. Built and hosted by Alchemetryx.
One view, every floor.
Live cost against the budget cap, coverage across all three floors, pending leave, and staffing alerts, gathered in one place rather than scattered across a workbook.
A rota that does the maths.
Build and publish the month by role and floor. Cost and scheduled hours update as shifts go in, so the wage bill is in front of the manager while there is still time to change it, not after payroll.
Leave and cover, tracked.
Annual leave, maternity and sick on one timeline, tied to entitlement. What used to live in a side note now sits beside the schedule it changes.
Practical measures · "A working system instead of unverified savings figures."
A working system instead of unverified savings figures.
If your rota still lives in a spreadsheet, that is a conversation worth having.
The system is live and runs on our own infrastructure. We do not publish estimated hours or pounds saved, because the measure of this work is visible above: a fragile spreadsheet replaced by one system that coordinates costs, shift coverage, and leave entitlement in one place.