Please note: The following feature is available as part of Birdie’s Starter, Core, Advanced and Plus packages (Also known as Care Management, Rostering & Finance, Premium, Entry and Essentials) Please get in touch if interested in more information on this feature!
When it comes to getting ready for payroll and invoicing, you will first start by reconciling and confirming your visits. You will do this in one central place, which then feeds into both your pay dashboard and invoice dashboard!
Follow the below steps to learn how!
Step 1: Locate the Confirm Visits tab
To reconcile and confirm your visits, first click ‘Confirm Visits’ on the top left of your Finance tab. Here, you will see a selection of filters at the top of the screen as well as a list of all visits that are waiting to be confirmed.
This table of visits at on the bottom half of the screen is organised into helpful columns, including:
Date of visit
People (Care recipient and Carer)
Planned time
Actual time
Discrepancy (gap between planned and actual timings)
Paid time
Invoiced time
Tags (Visual cues for Finance Managers)
On this screen, you'll also see additional options, allowing you to identify if you pay and/or invoice by planned or actual times.
Step 02: Filter the results
You can use the filters at the top of the 'Confirm visits' screen in order to filter the table down to the most relevant information before reconciling or confirming visits.
You can filter using one or more fields at the top of the 'Confirm visits' screen. In this instance, we first recommend that you filter to the time period for which you wish to review visits.
You can filter to select all in the Carer and Care recipient fields to quickly select all the relevant persons.
Once you’ve selected your filters, the table below will then reflect that selection!
Step 03: Filter down to visits that have been completed - then review and confirm them
Once you have filtered down to the visits within a specific time period, we recommend that you filter to visits that have been completed. birdie defines a completed visit as one that has a check-in and check-out time recorded from the mobile app.
To do this, click into the 'Visit completed' filter at the top of the screen and select 'Yes' from the drop-down menu.
Once you’ve selected this, the table below will then reflect that selection!
Looking at the table, you can easily see if there are visits where actual and planned times match - or if there is a small discrepancy. For those that match or meet your discrepancy threshold, you can confirm these in bulk!
To confirm these - you can tick the boxes to the left of these visits.
Then click 'confirm' in the top right-hand corner.
You can now select all (or some) of the visits on the confirmation page, and choose to Confirm only for invoicing or Confirm only for payroll. This is relevant to those who use shift pay.
Upon choosing one of the options, all the selected visits will be confirmed in that section and discarded in the other.
It is really important that you carefully review the timings and the actions you are making to avoid the visit being accidentally discarded and therefore not paid or charged for.
When you confirm a visit you will get a pop-up, in order for the visit to be successfully charged and paid for you should see two green ticks.
You can now click Confirm.
Please note: If you try and confirm a visit and you see the below pop-up where there are one or more errors this is because visits that show "N/A" in their paid/invoiced time columns cannot be successfully paid or charged for and will be discarded from payroll/invoicing.
Visits that are discarded will not be added to the invoice or the care professional's payslip. See images of the warnings below.
If you want to confirm for invoicing only or payroll only, click the arrow next to the Confirm button, once you have selected the visits you can decide whether they are confirmed for both payroll and invoicing or just one.
Step 04: Reconcile visits that require further investigation
For any completed visits that require further investigation, for instance there is a large discrepancy between the actuals and planned times, we then recommend that you further review.
You can first filter by the discrepancy by clicking the Discrepancy filter and selecting visits that run under or over your limits.
Once you have filtered your visits, click the icon to the left of any visit. This will pull up a menu:
Edit timings
Record expense
Manage expenses
Click on 'Edit timings'. This will open up the visit card, allowing you to review and make any edits needed.
Within the visit card, you will see the planned visit timing as well as actual visit timing. Below that, you will also see the paid timings and charged timings.
We recommend that you check what times have been recorded under ‘paid times’ and ‘charged times’ to ensure you are paying your carers and charging your funders for the appropriate timings.
If you need to make any adjustments you can. If something looks wrong, you can use the quick action buttons. These will let you:
Select that ‘Planned visit timing’ be ‘Use as paid’ and/or ‘Use as charged’
Select that ‘Actual visit timing’ be ‘Use as paid’ and/or ‘Use as charged’
If you click on these buttons, you will see that the timings below will change to reflect the actual or planned timings - depending on what you have clicked.
Or you can go in and manually edit the paid or charged timings by using the time and date selector. If you edit manually, you will need to select the date and time they are ‘Paid from’ and ‘Paid until.’ Once happy with these timings, click Save.
Once you are happy with these reviews and any adjustments you have made, you are now ready to confirm the visit. It is really important that you review the timings and the actions you are making to avoid the visit being accidentally discarded and therefore not paid or charged for.
When you confirm a visit you will get a pop-up, in order for the visit to be successfully charged and paid for you should see two green ticks. You can click 'Confirm.'
Step 05: Reconcile visits that haven’t been ‘Completed’
After you have reviewed and confirmed all visits that have been completed, we recommend you review any visits that haven't been completed. birdie defines a visit that hasn't been 'completed as one where we don't have a record of your care professional checking in or out on the mobile app.
To see visits that haven’t been completed, click into the 'Visit completed' filter at the top of the screen and select 'No' from the drop-down menu.
Once you’ve selected this, the table below will then reflect that selection.
You can then go in and further investigate these visits. If you want to pay your care professionals or charge for these uncompleted visits, you will need to ensure you edit the paid timings and/or charged timings within the visit card. See Step 04 for how to reconcile and edit visits that require further investigation.
You can then confirm these reconciled visits as before.
Step 06: Review any visits in the unscheduled visits or discarded tabs
As a final step in the reconciliation and confirmation process, we recommend you take a look at any visits that are in the following tabs: Unscheduled visits, Discarded from Payroll, Discarded from Invoices.
On the Confirm visits tab, click on 'Unscheduled visits.' If there are any visits here, you can click on the individual visit to edit it.
As necessary, you can add funding info to these visits and add them to a purchase order, which allows you to confirm and charge them.
Once you have selected the funding information, click 'save funding information.'
Once saved, you can then choose to invoice for this visit - to do so, tick the 'Should charge' box.
You can then edit the timings that you want to use for the charged timings.
Once happy with those adjustments, click 'Save.'
We advise that you review both the 'Discarded from payroll' and 'Discarded from Invoicing' tabs to ensure a visit meant to be confirmed hasn't accidentally ended up in the discarded tabs.
You can restore a visit if you have accidentally discarded it. Click the Discarded from payroll or Discarded from invoicing tab to view these visits.
Here you will see the visits that have been discarded, you can use the filters to search through if need be. Once you have found the visit, click the box next to the care recipient's name and then click ‘Restore’, these selected visits will move back to the list of visits to confirm.
Tags on the Confirm visits page
When getting ready to confirm visits, you may see information populated in the Tags column. These aim to give you information about that visit so that you can decide whether to confirm it or not.
Some examples:
Double booking tag
You will see a double-booked tag on the visit confirmation page which will prompt you to confirm only one of these visits to payroll so that the Care professional is paid correctly.
This will appear when a Care Professional has 2 or more visits starting and ending at the same time.
Confirmed visits & the Birdie app
Once you have confirmed your visits for payroll these will be shown on the Care Professionals app.
They will see the past month of confirmed visits, which gives them visibility over what visits they have completed and allows them to raise any concerns they may have regarding their pay.
Please note: They will only see visits that have been confirmed, for more information on what they will see in the app please read this article- How to view your timesheet on the Birdie app.
Step-by-step guide
You may find the below visit confirmation flowchart helpful, click here to download the PDF!
