Home-care staff scheduling for visiting-nurse agencies

Most home-care coordinators still build the week in a spreadsheet, then chase coverage in a group text when someone calls out at 6am. It works until the roster grows past a handful of nurses — then nobody is sure who is actually eligible to come in, and the coordinator stays on the phone through the start of the shift.

ShiftSynch gives a visiting-nurse or home-health agency one place to set roles, shifts, and staffing requirements, generate the weekly grid, and ask coverage questions by name. The Free plan covers 1 team and up to 10 staff with no credit card, so you can put a real unit in and see if the workflow sticks before you spend a dollar.

What ShiftSynch does for a home-care coordinator

Every item below is live in ShiftSynch today. This is a scheduling and coverage tool for small clinical teams — not a dispatch system and not a payroll suite.

Setup in one conversation, not one week

• Tell Sara you run a home-health agency with RNs, LPNs, and CNAs on Day, Evening, and Night. She can apply a nursing template and add the team, roles, and shifts.
• Set staffing requirements in plain language: Day 3 RNs + 2 CNAs, Night 2 RNs + 1 LPN, Evening 1 RN + 1 CNA.
• Add staff in bulk. Sara creates accounts and shows temporary passwords so the coordinator can hand them out.

A weekly grid you review, not a black box

• Rotation patterns generate the weekly schedule grid. A human reviews and adjusts it. That is semi-automated scheduling, not fully automated scheduling.
• Staff see the schedule on a dashboard and calendar they can open on the web.

Coverage by name, with rest-conflict exclusions

• After the schedule is generated, ask Sara who is on Tuesday night and who you can call in.
• She answers with real names, the gap (for example understaffed by 1 RN), and who is excluded because of a rest conflict from a prior Day shift.
• That call-in list is the workflow we built first. It is not a shift marketplace and not an open-shift claim board.

Credentials on Professional, when you need them

• Qualifications tracking — only credentialed staff fill credentialed slots — is on the Professional plan at $49/month, not Free or Basic.
• Use it when Night RN coverage cannot be filled by an LPN, or when a CNA slot must stay a CNA slot.

A note on honesty: ShiftSynch does not include GPS clock-in, payroll integrations (Gusto, ADP, QuickBooks), photo verification, or machine-learning demand prediction. The forecast tool, when used, is a suggestion, not a model that “learns your patterns.” Free is capped at 10 staff.

Flat per-agency pricing, not per-nurse

Home-care software is often sold per seat. A 25-nurse visiting-nurse agency should not pay 25 times a per-user fee to keep the schedule in one place. ShiftSynch uses flat per-organization plans:

	ShiftSynch	Spreadsheet / group text	Generic team scheduler
Starting cost	Free for 1 team, 10 staff	“Free” until a missed Night RN	Often per-seat
Paid plans	$19 / $49 / $99 per month, 14-day trial	—	Quote or per-user
Nursing roles & 24/7 shifts	RN / LPN / CNA, Day / Evening / Night	You invent the columns	Usually office hours
Setup	One Sara conversation	You build the sheet	Config panels
Who can I call?	Names + rest-conflict exclusions	You scan the roster	A calendar, not a call-in list
Qualifications	Professional ($49/mo)	No	Sometimes, often extra

Current plan limits: Free 1 team / 10 staff; Basic $19/mo, 30 staff; Professional $49/mo, 5 teams / 50 staff; Enterprise $99/mo, unlimited. Annual plans are about 20% off. See the pricing page.

Get a 10-nurse unit off the spreadsheet this week

Start on the Free plan with 1 team and up to 10 staff, no credit card. Apply the nursing template in Sara, set Day / Evening / Night requirements, add the first nurses, generate the grid, and ask who is covered Tuesday night. When you outgrow 10 staff, paid plans scale to 30 or 50, or unlimited on Enterprise — each with a 14-day trial.