A Year of Building: How Careberry Has Evolved Since September 2025

A few weeks ago, I was on a call with a registered manager who has used Careberry for four years. We were supposed to be talking about something else entirely. Halfway through, he stopped and said, “This doesn’t feel like the same system we started on.”

He meant it kindly. He also meant it literally.

No care platform changes in one dramatic moment. It changes in fortnightly releases that land on an ordinary Tuesday, while somebody in the office is covering a sickness call and somebody else is chasing a GP surgery for a medication change. You rarely notice the individual step. You notice the distance, a year later, when you happen to look back.

So, I looked back. I pulled together everything we have shipped since 1 September 2025 and put it in one list. It surprised me.

Scheduling: the part of the job that never sleeps

If you have ever run a care service, you will know that the rota is not an administrative task. It is the service. Get it wrong on a Friday afternoon, and you are still repairing the damage on Monday.

Scheduling has been our single biggest area of investment this year. We introduced a new generation of booking tools with Booking V2: faster timelines, better drag-and-drop, filters that stay put when you move around the system, and a far more workable way of handling large rotas. We extended it into weekly scheduling, and it is now the default experience.

We also rebuilt runs. Runs V2 gives coordinators a much more flexible way to create, schedule and manage visits across multiple days, weeks and clients, rather than rebuilding the same shape of work over and over.

Small mercies, repeated four hundred times a week, stop being small.

Compliance is not a folder. It’s a habit.

Every provider I meet has a compliance folder. Very few have a compliance habit. The difference shows up the moment an inspector asks how you know something, rather than whether you have a policy about it.

This year we put serious effort into the tools that turn intention into evidence.

• Task Management brought structured compliance workflows into the platform, so an organisation can define the activities staff or clients must complete and see what is outstanding, rather than finding out at renewal time.
• Role Management has grown into a far more comprehensive permissions system, with granular control across roles and branches. One login, the right access, no shared passwords.
• Data Retention controls now let organisations manage how long information is held, which matters under the Data Protection Act 2018 and UK GDPR and matters even more when you are asked to demonstrate it.
• Care plan read receipts, expanded medication functionality, broader compliance dashboards and more structured client information round out the picture.

None of these are new buttons. They are the governance framework that lets a service run consistently when the manager is on annual leave.

The minutes nobody counts

Some of the most valuable work we did this year is the least impressive to describe.

We went looking for the repetitive jobs that quietly consume a coordinator’s afternoon, and we removed as many of them as we could: bulk booking changes, rota cloning, bulk deletion of service actions, improved payroll exports, rate duplication, unavailability imports, better search, better filtering, easier navigation.

We also kept developing Form Builder, so organisations can shape how they capture information rather than bending their practice around ours. It now supports tables, review frequencies, initial completion periods, reporting and, mercifully, Undo.

On its own, each of these saves seconds. Across a hundred staff, thousands of visits and a full year, seconds turn into evenings. I would rather give a coordinator their Thursday evening back than give them another dashboard.

Care doesn’t happen behind a desk

I spent years in services where the most important conversations of the day took place in somebody’s front room, not in the office. So a large share of this year’s development went into the mobile experience.

The Careberry Carers and Admin apps gained new capabilities across medication, expenses, staff availability, care information and day-to-day operational management.

We also expanded offline functionality. Care plans and selected forms can now be available offline, alongside the information staff need when they are working somewhere with poor signal. Large parts of this country have poor signal. A carer standing in a rural kitchen should not have to choose between following the care plan and following the process.

The aim is simple: Careberry should work where the care happens, not only where the office is.

Money, moved once

Finance is where good services lose money quietly. Not through fraud, but through rekeying, reconciling and repeating.

Careberry now supports GoCardless for direct debit payments and Xero export alongside our existing accounting capabilities. More recently we added Sage 50-compatible invoice exports and Credit Notes directly within Careberry, so a correction no longer means an apologetic email and a manual adjustment somewhere else.

Around those integrations sit dozens of improvements to invoices, payslips, payroll exports, rates, annual leave calculations and financial reporting. Fewer places for a number to change on its way from a visit to a bank account.

AI that has to earn its place

I will say what I always say about this. We are not interested in adding AI because it is fashionable. The sector has had quite enough of software that promises to be revolutionary and cannot produce a medication audit. We are interested in AI where it removes a real piece of friction from a real day.

This year, AI in Careberry moved from an experiment at the edge of the platform to three things people use.

AI Assist reads daily notes across all or selected clients over any period you choose and surfaces the risks, actions and errors sitting inside them. It reviews care plans for gaps and inconsistencies, and it helps staff write clearer notes and family updates. Anyone who has read four hundred notes on a Sunday afternoon hunting for the one line that mattered will understand why we built it.

Knowledge AI is the one I would point to first. Every policy, procedure and manual, uploaded once, then answerable in plain language from inside the carer app, with each answer citing the exact section of the document it came from.

Think about what that replaces. It is nine o’clock at night, a carer is standing in somebody’s hallway with a question about the medication policy, and until now the realistic options were ring the on-call manager or make a judgement call alone. Neither is good enough.

Careberry Capture is in the final stage of release. It records assessments, supervisions, meetings and interviews, transcribes them and populates the relevant fields for you, so that an assessment can be a conversation with a person rather than a note-taking exercise conducted across a coffee table.

Two principles sit underneath all of it, and they are not up for negotiation. Your data stays yours and stays in the UK, and it is never used to train AI models. And there is a human in the loop, always: AI drafts, qualified staff approve, and every AI action is on the audit trail. That is not a limitation we are apologising for. It is the only version of this that belongs anywhere near regulated care.

The work you never see

Not every important improvement produces something to click.

During the year we carried out substantial work on the infrastructure and architecture underneath Careberry. We migrated resources to Microsoft’s UK West Azure region to strengthen resilience and service stability. We continued modernising permissions and identity, and we progressively replaced older components with newer ones.

This is the part of the job nobody writes a press release about. It is also the part that decides whether your system is still standing at 7 a.m. on a Monday in January, when every service in the country is trying to load the same rota at once.

Why any of this matters

Software is like a care service. Leave it alone for a year and it does not stay the same; it gets worse. Standards drift, the world moves, and what once felt modern becomes the thing everybody works around.

Since 1 September 2025 we have delivered improvements across scheduling, care planning, compliance, medication, finance, reporting, mobile working, forms, permissions, infrastructure and AI. Some were major projects that ran for months. Others were small changes suggested by somebody on a support call who said, “It would be so much easier if…”

Both count. We still ship every two weeks, we are still bootstrapped, and we still build this the way we did when we were running our own care company and had to live with every decision we made.

People first. Process next. Technology always.

There is plenty we still want to simplify and build. But if a year can make Careberry feel like a different system to somebody who uses it every day, I am fairly encouraged by what the next one looks like.

If you would like to see what has changed, or you are still holding a service together across five different systems and a spreadsheet, book a viewing of Careberry and we will show you around properly.