Muttmates Home Care

What the Home Care module adds

Muttmates Core is the spine of your back office: clients and dogs, the diary, prices, payment links, receipts, reminders, emails and settings. This manual covers only what the Home Care module adds on top, so if you have not read the Muttmates Core owner's manual, start with that.

Home Care is for looking after the dog at home while the owners are away — not a kennel stay, not a walk on its own. It adds:

• Care plans: one date range, one or more visits a day, overnight stays if you're asked for them — save it and every visit (and every night) is made for you, one ordinary booking each.
• The household: access notes and where things are, kept on the client; feeding, medication and routine, kept on the dog — compiled onto every visit automatically so whoever's on duty has it at the door.
• The visit update: what was done, how the dog seemed, a photo, a line home — sent (and texted) the moment you tap send.
• The stay report: one "welcome home" email when they're back, rolling up every visit you've already sent.
• One bill: a single statement for everything owing across the whole plan, not one payment link per visit.

Home Care is available on every plan. If it is installed but not on your plan, you get one quiet line about it under Settings → Plan and nothing else — no banner, and no data touched.

Your Home care page

Your services → Home care in the rail opens the page. Four tiles: Today — visits today, and how many are already done; In care now, dogs currently on a running plan; Next 14 days, visits on the diary; and Owing on plans. Beside the heading sit + New care plan and Mobile app.

The tab row:

The main column leads with Today's visits — each with a Take cash button where something's due and an Update button straight to that visit's report — then Care plans, every plan currently running or still to come, each showing its bookings, whether it's In care or Coming, and what's due; then Coming up, the next fortnight's visits. The side column is Needs marking off — any visit whose time has passed with no update sent — which also shows up on Today's own Needs you, so nothing sits unfinished by accident.

A care plan is the dates and pattern — the visits and nights are the bookings

A care plan itself is not a booking. It's the shape of the stay: who, from when to when, how many visits a day and when, and whether nights are wanted. Save it, and Muttmates makes an ordinary booking for every visit and every night it describes — ticked "This is a home-care visit" (and, for a night, "…and an overnight stay" too), in-home at the client's address, priced from the service you picked. Everything that already works for a booking — the diary, the mobile app, payment links, receipts, credit, statements — works on these unchanged.

Because each visit is its own real booking, you can move one, add an extra by hand, or trash one without touching the plan; change the plan's dates or its visits, and the future ones simply follow. A booking already paid is never trashed just because you changed your mind about that slot — see When something goes wrong below.

Setting up what you offer

A home-care service is set up under Services & prices, ticked This is a home-care visit — three are seeded for you the first time the module runs: Drop-in visit (30 min) at $25, Long visit (60 min) at $40, and Overnight stay at $90 for 720 minutes, additionally ticked …and an overnight stay. Change the names and prices to yours, and add more lengths or rates as you need them. Where should be In-home — a visit is at the client's address, and travel zones apply.

Tick a service …and an overnight stay and a care plan will offer it under Overnight (price) rather than in the ordinary Visits each day rows — the two are kept apart because a night is priced and timed differently from a visit.

Setting up a care plan

Home care → + New care plan asks for:

Save, and the plan works out every visit and night the dates and rows describe, and makes (or updates) a booking for each. Change the dates or the rows later and it does the same again — new slots are added, slots you removed are dropped, and nothing already made is duplicated.

The household — what the carer needs at the door

Two field groups hold what a plan compiles onto every visit:

On the client, under Home access — for home care: Parking & the dog (parking, and where the dog will be) and Where things are. On the dog, under Care at home: Feeding, Medication, and Routine & quirks. (Run Boarding too, and these same fields — feeding, medication, routine — live there instead; nothing is duplicated, and whichever module is on registers them once.) Emergency contact, the vet, and how much treatment is authorised without asking first live on the client too, under While they're away — again a single set of fields shared with Boarding.

On save, every visit's private notes are compiled fresh from the plan's own Instructions for this stay, the client's access notes and vet details, and each dog's feeding, medication and routine — named per dog when there's more than one on the plan. Edit a visit's notes yourself afterwards and your version is kept; only a note still exactly as last compiled gets refreshed as the household details change.

The visit update

Every visit carries a Visit update box, in place of the training, walking, day or groom reports: tick what was done from Fed, Fresh water, Walked, Toilet break, Meds given, Play & cuddles, Garden / litter checked and Mail in, bins, lights; pick How they seemed (Happy and bouncy, Settled, A bit quiet, Unsettled / anxious, or Off colour — keep an eye); add Photos, as many as you like; and A line for the owner — this is the one line that gets texted, when texting's on.

The Visit update panel sends it: Mark the visit Done when sent, ticked by default, Text the line too where the client has a mobile and texting is on, then Email the owner (or Text the owner if there's no email on file at all) — greyed out until something's ticked or written. A new booking opened straight from the Home care page starts with the first home-care service already ticked, so it's ready as a visit from the moment it's created.

The stay report — welcome home

When the owners are back, send the stay report: your own How the stay went, plus any Extra photos not already on a visit. The email — subject line "…welcome home!" — carries your summary, then every visit that has an update, in order, each with its date and time (nights marked as such), what was ticked, how the dog seemed, the line, and the photos, automatically rolled up from the updates you've already sent. There's rarely anything left to write beyond the summary itself.

The Stay report box on the plan shows whether one's gone already, how many visits have an update so far, and offers Email the stay report (or Email again) with Preview ↗ — save the plan first if you've only just written the summary, so it's picked up.

No reminder, and the safety clock — two things switched off on purpose

Home Care turns off two things Muttmates normally does, on purpose. There's no reminder sent before a visit — a booking reminder assumes someone's there to read it, and the owners are away. And the mobile app's lone-worker safety check-in — the "are you OK?" clock that runs on an in-home visit — is switched off specifically for an overnight stay, though it still applies to an ordinary drop-in visit; nobody wants a safety prompt at 7 am while someone's asleep in the client's house.

The bill — one statement for the whole plan

Rather than a payment link per visit, a care plan bills as one: the plan's own box offers Send the bill once anything is owing, and it sends one statement covering everything owed up to the plan's last day, with a single Pay button — by email if the client has one, and by text (a payment link) if they don't but texting is available. Nothing goes out, and nothing is charged twice, for a plan that's already fully paid.

Taking home care online

On the +Online plans, with online booking switched on and a home-care visit service ticked Book online, home care appears on your booking page as an offer — priced "from $X a visit", with overnight rates shown too where you've set one. It's a request, like Boarding's, but softer still: the client picks a first day past your notice period, then answers Last day of care, Visits a day (one, two or three — seeding 8:00, or 8:00 and 6:00 pm, or 8:00, 12:30 and 6:00 pm), whether they'd like Overnights, which other dogs on their account are also at home, Parking, and where your dog will be (with the same warning about not adding security details, and the same automatic code-stripping), and Instructions for this stay. An emergency contact and your agreement are asked for before it can be requested at all.

Nothing is booked until you say so. The request makes a draft care plan — not a booking — stamped as asked for online, and it lands on Today's Needs you: "Home care asked for online: … — set the visits and publish to confirm." Open it, set the visit times and services the way you actually want them, and publish; the visits are made, the confirmation goes, and the bill follows as it always does. On their own login, the client sees an Ask for home care card, and a draft they've asked for shows as "Asked for — we're setting it up" until you publish it. Their own portal also carries a Your home section with the same access-notes and about-the-house fields, kept for next time.

Settings and set-up reference

When something goes wrong

A care plan's visits don't match what I set. Save the plan again — every visit and night is worked out fresh from the dates and the rows each time. New slots are added and slots you removed are dropped, but a visit already paid is always left in place even if its row is gone; you'll see a notice saying so.

A visit I expected isn't there, even though the plan covers that day. If the plan was entered or changed after that day had already started, a visit more than a day in the past is never invented — it won't backfill history.

The access notes came back with "[code removed]" in them. That's deliberate, not a fault — any run of four or more digits is stripped before it's ever saved, on the client's record or an online request alike. Arrange access with the client directly; it isn't meant to be written there at all.

A client didn't get a reminder before their visit. By design — home care sends no reminder before a visit, since the owners are away.

An overnight stay's carer got no safety check-in, or a drop-in visit's carer got one at an odd hour. Also by design — the lone-worker safety clock runs on drop-in visits but is switched off for overnight stays.

Send the bill did nothing. Every visit on the plan is already paid — there's nothing owing, so nothing was sent.

Couldn't send the bill. The client needs an email address or a mobile number on file — add one and try again.

An online home-care request never turns into real visits. That's by design — it's a draft plan, not a booking. Find it on Today's Needs you, open it, set the visits the way you want them, and publish.