CareVerify vs spreadsheets and paper
The straight answer
Spreadsheets are free, flexible and genuinely adequate for a small agency. They fail at exactly one thing, and it is the thing this industry runs on: a timesheet is somebody's recollection, not evidence a visit happened. If nobody is asking you to prove visits, and payroll is quick, stay where you are.
What spreadsheets do well
Most vendors treat the spreadsheet as an embarrassment to be escaped. It is not. There are good reasons agencies still run on them, and they deserve stating.
They cost nothing
At the stage where every hundred dollars a month is a real decision, free is a serious feature and not a consolation prize.
Nobody needs training
Your office already knows Excel. There is no rollout, no adoption problem, and no caregiver refusing to install an app on their personal phone.
They bend to you
Need a column for which client prefers which caregiver, or a tab for the one payer who wants something odd? Add it in ten seconds. No software gives you that, ours included.
Paper never goes down
No outage, no login, no dead battery in a client's driveway. That reliability is real, and it is why paper persists in fieldwork generally.
Nobody can take it away
The file is yours. No vendor can raise your price, change the interface, or go out of business and leave you scrambling. That is a genuine risk you take on when you buy from anyone, including a small company like us.
The one thing paper can never do
A timesheet records what somebody remembers, written down after the fact, by the person whose pay depends on the answer. That is not an accusation about your caregivers. It is a description of what the document is.
So when a payer asks you to substantiate eleven visits from March, or a client's daughter asks whether anyone came on Tuesday, what you can produce is a recollection. Everyone in the conversation understands that, including you.
Independent evidence, captured at the time, at the place, by the device rather than by memory, is a categorically different thing. Not better handwriting. A different kind of record.
A spreadsheet has a related weakness that gets less attention: any cell can be changed later and nothing shows that it was. There is no version history, no reason recorded, no before and after. For a document whose whole job is to be trusted, that is a problem even when nobody has done anything wrong.
How you know it has stopped working
People ask for a caregiver count. The count is not the signal. These are:
- You cannot answer "did that visit happen" from memory. You have to open a file and read someone's handwriting. That is the moment the record became the system rather than a backup for what you already knew.
- Payroll has become somebody's morning. Not twenty minutes. A block of time, every week, spent turning handwriting into numbers and texting people about gaps.
- You have started finding errors after paying. A 7.25 written as 7.15, a visit on a day the schedule says somebody was elsewhere, a caregiver who is sure she worked Thursday.
- You found out about a missed visit from the client. Not from your own records, days later.
- You have taken a Medicaid client. This one is binary rather than gradual. Paper is not electronic visit verification, and the requirement applies from the first Medicaid visit.
One of these is a nuisance. Three of them together is a system that has quietly stopped doing its job.
Do the arithmetic yourself
We are not going to tell you how many hours a week you spend on reconciliation, because we do not know and any number we invented would be marketing.
Time yourself next Monday instead. Note when you start the payroll reconciliation and when you finish, including the texts chasing missing timesheets. Multiply by four. Put whatever you think an hour of your time is worth against it, and compare that to our published price.
If the arithmetic says stay on the spreadsheet, stay on the spreadsheet. It is a real answer and plenty of agencies should reach it.
Our free hours calculator will add up a week for you in the meantime, without you buying anything.
Which are you?
Stay on spreadsheets if
- You have a handful of caregivers and no Medicaid work
- You know what happened this week without looking
- Payroll takes under half an hour
- Nobody has ever asked you to prove a visit
Move if
- You bill Medicaid, or you are about to
- Payroll reconciliation has become a fixed weekly cost
- You have had a dispute about hours you could not settle quickly
- A family has asked a question about a visit you could not answer confidently
Check the free option first if
- You bill Medicaid and your state or plan sponsors an EVV portal. It may cost you nothing and cover the requirement on its own. Read that comparison before this one
Side by side
Spreadsheets win 5 of these rows and we win 7. The rows they win are not trivial ones, which is the point.
| What | Paper or spreadsheet | CareVerify | Better here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free, or the price of a notepad | From $99 a month | Spreadsheets |
| Learning curve | Everyone already knows it | An afternoon, plus getting caregivers onto an app | Spreadsheets |
| Flexibility | Add any column you like, any time | Works the way we built it | Spreadsheets |
| Works with no internet, always | Paper never goes down | Offline capture, but it is still software | Spreadsheets |
| Nothing to depend on a vendor for | The file is yours forever | Exportable any time, but we are a company | Spreadsheets |
| Evidence a visit actually happened | A signature written from memory | Time and location captured at the door | CareVerify |
| Meets the Medicaid EVV requirement | No | Supports it. Claims still go through your state system | CareVerify |
| Audit trail | A cell can be changed with no record | Corrections require a reason and keep the original | CareVerify |
| Knowing about a missed visit today | You find out when the timesheet arrives | Office is texted 30 minutes after the scheduled start | CareVerify |
| Caregivers seeing their own hours | They call the office | In the app, updated as visits complete | CareVerify |
| Turning a week into payroll hours | Manual reading, typing and adding up | Export, with unresolved visits surfaced first | CareVerify |
| What happens if it is lost | One laptop or one folder is the whole record | Backed up, and exportable at any time | CareVerify |
If you do move, do not migrate your history
The most common way a transition goes wrong is trying to bring three years of visits across. Do not. Those visits are already recorded, and the spreadsheet keeps working as an archive forever.
Start clean at the beginning of a pay period. Bring across your current client list, your caregivers and next week's schedule, which is an afternoon of work, and leave the past where it is.
Run one week in parallel if it makes you comfortable, then stop. Two systems that disagree are worse than either alone, so pick which one is authoritative early and mean it.
Questions
Are paper timesheets acceptable for Medicaid?
Not as electronic visit verification. If any of your visits are Medicaid funded, federal law requires them to be verified electronically, and a signed paper timesheet is not that. Your state will have a defined process for what happens when a system fails, and it is worth knowing that process before you need it.
Can I keep my spreadsheet alongside software?
You can, and plenty of agencies do during a transition. The thing to avoid is running both permanently as the source of truth, because two records that disagree are worse than either one alone. Pick which is authoritative and let the other be a working copy.
How many caregivers before a spreadsheet stops working?
There is no clean number, but the signal is more reliable than the headcount: when you can no longer answer 'did that visit happen' without opening a file and reading someone's handwriting, the spreadsheet has stopped doing the job. For most agencies that lands somewhere around ten to fifteen caregivers.
What about moving my history over?
You do not have to. Past visits can stay where they are, since they are already recorded and you can keep the file. Start the new system from a clean date, usually the beginning of a pay period, and keep the old spreadsheet as an archive rather than migrating it.
Time next Monday first
Genuinely. If reconciliation takes you twenty minutes, close this page and keep your spreadsheet. If it takes a morning, the trial is 14 days and the clock starts at your first caregiver check-in rather than at signup, so setting it up costs you none of it.