Branches in CareFree are a way of splitting your Clients and Carers. Branches might be geographical areas, or you might name the branches after physical office's you run as a company.

Branches are typically used in larger care companies especially when it might be a particular coordinators role to look after a certain area. There are other clever uses of branches for spitting people against roles or having a “training” branch where new starters are placed, but these wont be discussed on this article.

Lets take a look at adding branches into the system. From the main menu select items from the toolbar:

You will then navigate to “Branches” in the left hand list, once on Branches you will see this screen:

Using the new button at the bottom of the screen will allow you to add new branches into the system. Notice that you also have the edit button so if the default branch is named incorrectly it can be fixed from this screen.

Enter the name of the branch, and select the company this is linked to, usually this would already be at the default selection.

The rest of the fields allows for additional information to be entered, a useful one is the foreground and background colours so that you can easily see which carers/clients belong to a specific branch, this information is visible from the rota.

Once a branch is selected, you then need to make some changes to both Clients and Carers to link them up.

To link a carer, go into Carer > Branches and then tick the correct branch.

To link a Client, go into Clients > Other Details > Branch drop down and select the correct branch.

You will start seeing changes within the CareFree system.

When logging into the system, you are asked to select a branch - this is excellent if you don't need to worry about other branches and allows you to work within one:

If you've not logged into a specific branch, you will still get filtering options within the rota:

Creating branches has an effect on the overall system, Branches are a powerful way of splitting up clients and carers, and is even useful when running reports as it gives you a quick method of filtering.