What changes were included in the October 2022 release?

Hello Nightingale Family, we are super excited to share with you all Nightingale Version 2022.35.0.0! Fabulous new features, functional fixes, and lots of good things. Here's the top highlights, and we were heavy on the bug spray too.

Where possible, new features are hidden via Staff Position settings so you can choose which to deploy, and when, to suit your organisation.

If you have any feedback or questions, pop them through to our Technical Support fairies.

What’s New:

Self-managed and Plan-managed Clients Defined Separately

All Nightingale functionality related to self/plan managed NDIS clients/funding will now be split giving you the ability to specify whether a client or funding item is self-managed or plan-managed. It will also now enable you to manage clients with a mix of self and plan-managed funding.

note

Note: All existing self/plan-managed NDIS clients and funding items will initially default to be marked as plan-managed with this update applied. This will not affect the functionality of your existing self-managed clients and no immediate action is required. Without the addition, by you, of a client contact designated with the new ‘plan-managed invoice payer’ tag, your invoices will continue to be addressed to any contacts with the old ‘invoice payer’ tag or to the client themselves. Simply run the plan-managed invoice function to generate invoices for all your existing self/plan-managed clients.

Note: All existing self/plan-managed NDIS clients and funding items will initially default to be marked as plan-managed with this update applied. This will not affect the functionality of your existing self-managed clients and no immediate action is required. Without the addition, by you, of a client contact designated with the new ‘plan-managed invoice payer’ tag, your invoices will continue to be addressed to any contacts with the old ‘invoice payer’ tag or to the client themselves. Simply run the plan-managed invoice function to generate invoices for all your existing self/plan-managed clients.

Group Ratios Functionality

A new Group Ratios page that will allow Users to add multiple rosters that hold different ratio splits for NDIS funding. For any ratio that is not 1:1, a cost will be calculated, and this cost will be deducted from the client's funding.

In addition, a drop down has been added to all places where rostering occurs to give a User the ability to add a funding item that can be split between clients.

Nightingale Public Forms

This feature allows a staff member in Nightingale to create a case note and send a link to a client who can fill it out without the need for that client to have a Nightingale login. More information and dedicated Knowledge Base articles on this functionality will be added over the coming weeks.

Auto Submit Timesheets

Now your staff can rest easy knowing their timesheets will be automatically submitted each pay period. You just need to turn the option on and make sure everyone marks their attendances.

Case Note Moderation by Type

Case Note Moderation is currently a global setting applying to all Case Notes. This new feature adds a new setting within Case Note Types that allows configuration of whether the Case Notes of that type require Moderation or not.

Updated HCP Template to New Government Standard

This reflects the new required HCP fields from the 2022 template. This includes opening and closing unspent subsidy held by homecare, opening and closing unspent client contributions, opening and closing unspent subsidy held by Services Australia, total care management fee and total package management fee.

The team has also added HCP income and expenses, and client fee sections notes alongside client leave reports.

Add Location Details to Client SMS Reminder Template

Client SMS template and the staff SMS template is a predefined template which allows the customer to send SMS’s to the clients and staff with the relevant shift (appointment) details such as the shift (appointment) date, start time, end time. This new feature adds the ability to pre-populate the SMS message with location information regarding the relevant shift (appointment).

Additional Group Filters

Now you can run more reports using groups as your filter. Client allocated units, staff -target hours, staff - timesheet and supported employee reports are all enabled with this feature. More will follow.

Replace Appointment Subject text on Calendar

If you visit [Organisation Settings] > [Calendar] > [Settings] you can completely replace appointment subject text (including appended info like attendance status, client/staff, etc.) with shift code name if a shift code is selected.

Improvements to Shift Bidding

Shift bidding has had some major upgrades under the hood. If you have not had an opportunity to utilise shift bidding for those last minute shift changes then now is a great time to request additional training and get bidding.

Un-assign Deactivated Staff from their Rosters

In previous iterations, when a staff member was deactivated, all the rosters to which that staff member was assigned were removed from the client’s calendar. While the funding items still show these rosters, many customers use the calendar for rostering, or at least checking the correctness of rosters and assigning staff.

For this reason, it was decided that un-assigning the deactivated staff member from their rosters so that the client calendar would still show them, as well as indicating that they are currently Unassigned so that schedulers know to find a new staff member for those shifts.

Changes to Client funding can now be Moderated

This new feature will add Support Funding as a new area that can run through moderation/approval-based workflow. This means that all funding that has been added or modified on a client/participant's account will require approval before it can be used by the scheduling team for rostering of supports, or allocation of any Support Coordinators (if Nightingale's Billable Case Note is in use).

Deactivate Shift Codes

Quite a simple feature, but now you can deactivate an entire shift code for your roster.

Unlock Client Balances

Users now have the ability to unlock “Other Funding” balances (CHSP, HACC, HCP, Brokerage, Private, etc) as well as NDIS claims and balances.

Linking Custom Forms to clients goals and outcomes

A new Custom Field type has been added which, when added to a Case Note Type, will allow Users to create new goal reports when creating a new Case Note of that type. This Custom Field is called “Goal Report”.

Dormant Staff Report

Dormant in Nightingale refers to having no Appointments or Attendances in the last 6 months. This new report shows all Staff Members that have had no Appointments or Attendances in the last 6 months. This report is in the same format as all current Nightingale reports with customisation and export capabilities.

Supported Employee functionality (Various features)

More extensive Supported Employee-specific functionality will be released and documented here shortly over the next few weeks. This includes a new report titled "Client Supported Employee Hours Export" that provides a breakdown of rostered hours per Supported Employee for a User specified date range.

Reminders if Supported Employee is waitlisted for 4 weeks

Schedulers will now be alerted when a Supported Employee has been put on a wait list for over 4 weeks. The “waitlist” status is defined by the Client Type of “Waitlist” being applied to the client’s details.

Maximum budget when budget first selected on the funding template

Funding template now shows maximum budget on the funding template when budget first is selected instead of total funding/units.

Client Leave Types

When adding or editing Client Leave there is a new required drop down field to select a client Leave Type.

Client Leave Filtering

The “View Client Leave” page now shows only the most recent 50 records (according to leave start date) and has a search panel for viewing older records and/or records that overlap with a specific date, similar to view case notes pages.

Split Appointments when approving Staff Leave

When a Staff Member’s Leave Application is approved in Nightingale and any part of the leave application falls within any part of an existing Appointment where the ‘Client’ is ‘internal’, Nightingale will split the Appointment into two, as follows:

• One Inactive appointment (covering the time when the staff member will be on leave)
• One Active appointment (which stays as time on the Staff Member’s calendar).

Staff Leave Application Categorisation

When a Staff Member applies for leave, they can select the “Funding Category” that the leave affects. When viewing a timesheet, Nightingale will only show leave associated with the “Funding Category” the timesheet is allocated to. For example: a staff member can now apply for leave only from their NDIS supports, but continue delivering supports for HCP.

Xero Transfer

We have improved our additional Xero invoice transfer with Xero - Transfer Other Sales. This combines Xero - Transfer Private Sales and some additional functionality hence the renaming. Just use Transfer Other Sales like you would use Transfer Private Sales.

Speeeeeeeeed!

Our developers did a deep dive into our existing code and find some incredible speed improvements across our platform. Keep an eye out for these in places like the funding and rostering pages.

Quality of Life Improvements

These are a few of the many small improvements we’ve made to help you in your day-to-day use of Nightingale.

• Client Service Invoices now have the ability to run by group.
• The Nightingale app now allows the user to type in kilometres with decimal places and they will be accurately added to the attendance.
• You can now easily remove KeyPay work type, location and funding ratio from rostered jobs.
• Improved Invoice Summary Report with plan / self managed and notes columns.
• Tweaks to the staff rostered units bar to better display information.
• Performance improvements on expired case note alerts. This will improve your Nightingale instance speed across the board.
• Calendar now allows changing of appointments with inactive attendances.
• Invoices now show tax exclusive, inclusive or no tax dependent on client settings.
• Improved settings for default hours and paid leave hours per day for staff.
• Better error reporting on invoices being sent to help you figure out where things went wrong.
• Added consolidate attendance option to staff attendance hours report.

Bug Fix

We acquired some very potent bug spray for Halloween, here’s the results!

Spamming of Save Button On Multiple Staff Rostering

Previously, the “Save” button on the multi-staff rostering page could be spammed allowing the creation of multiple rosters with the same values. This has now been fixed.

Removing attachments

The ability to remove an attachment saved to a Case Note and other areas has been restored.

Adding Claim Types to Attendance

Claim types (e.g. CANC) for NDIS services only appear on invoices if those services are recorded/created by a billable case note. If a cancellation is recorded via the roster by applying an Attendance Status of “Cancelled” (mapped with NDIS cancellation claim type of “Other”), it does not populate the invoice with this claim type. This has now been fixed.

KM’s To Client and KM’s With Client

KM's With client were not displaying on timesheets. Fix applied now displays KM's To and KM's With client.

Provider Travel Non-Labour Cost

Provider Travel Non-Labour Cost was not always pulling through the correct charge amount on the invoice. This has now been fixed.

Billable Case Note Cancellation Reason

Cancellation reason populating automatically by default when Non-face to face service is selected. This has now been fixed.

A bunch of smaller bugs have also been squashed 

• Email alerts no longer causing site slowness.
• Budget check triggers correctly when adding new shifts to calendar.
• Cleaned up misbehaving case note upload button.
• Cleaned up allocated funding displayed on the client funding graphs.
• “Email to clients” option now properly checks for plan / self managed invoice payers.
• Reoccurring appointment must now always have an end date.
• Under client details, Media and Communications now correctly displays all fields.
• No longer attempting to divide by zero when adding $0 funding balance to $0 rate funding.

A Final Word

You might notice that our much loved “Cracked Egg” error is no-longer with us. This has temporarily been replaced with a 404 (file not found) and a 403 (permission not found) error.