Workflow & Tasks - Introduction

Overview

Track is Casebook's provider and service management application. It gives your organization one place to record who delivers services, what those services are, who receives them, and how they are paid for.

At its foundation, Track is a directory of providers. You use it to build records for the organizations and locations you work with, whether that is your own agency, a contracted or licensed partner, or a community resource you refer people to. Each provider record can hold contact details, licensing and contract information, assigned staff, files, forms, tasks, and the services that provider offers.

On top of that directory, Track connects the people you serve to the services they receive. Staff can enroll people into services, document each service interaction, and tie the cost of those services back to the grants and funds that pay for them. Because this information lives in the same platform as your intake reports, cases, and person profiles, everything a person receives is visible from their record, and everything a provider delivers is visible from the provider's record.

This article introduces the core concepts behind Track so you can understand how the pieces fit together before you configure or use them. Step-by-step instructions are covered in the related articles listed at the end.

Benefits

• A single source of truth for providers. Provider managers can monitor and update information for all of their assigned providers in one place instead of opening many individual records. The Track Workload View lists every provider with key details such as type, status, license status, capacity, alerts, county, and assignee, and it can be filtered (for example, to "My Work" or a specific provider type) and exported to CSV for sharing.
• Earlier awareness of risk. Using workflows with providers enables alerting for upcoming deadlines and urgent new situations, combined with a visible history of past issues, help staff keep providers in good standing and protect the safety of the people in their care. Knowing a provider's history makes it faster to make decisions and assess risk.
• A shared menu of services. Service offerings built in Track act as your organization's menu of services. When staff enroll someone in a service or write a service note anywhere in Casebook, they choose from the same consistent list.
• Flexibility to match how you deliver services. Track supports services your own staff provide, services delivered by partners you manage under contract or license, and referrals to outside organizations. Service delivery can be tracked on a case, on an intake report, or directly on a provider record when your work doesn't involve cases.
• Faster documentation for group services. With Service Rostering, everyone enrolled in a class or cohort is added to each service note automatically, so staff don't have to add attendees one at a time.
• Meaningful counts and costs. Each service defines how it is measured (sessions, hours, bed nights, meals) and what each unit costs, so totals in reporting translate into real-world terms for funders and leadership.
• Funding accountability. Funding Sources link services to the grants or funds that pay for them, so the cost of each enrollment or service note is drawn down against the right fund and you can see how much has been spent and how many people each fund has served.
• Reporting that tells the full story. Provider, service enrollment, service note, and funding data are all available in Reporting and can be combined with case and demographic data for grant reports, board presentations, audits, and program evaluation.

Before You Begin

Before you start building in Track, make sure the following are in place:

• You have access and the right permissions. Your user account needs access to Track, and the actions you can take (creating providers, adding service offerings, enrolling people, managing funding sources) depend on your assigned roles. Funding Sources permissions come with the Provider Supervisor role by default and can be added to custom roles. You also need to be on a Casebook plan that has Funding Sources or have purchased it as an add-on. If you can't see or do something you expect to, contact your Casebook Customer Success Manager.
• Your configurable fields are set up. Many Track fields use dropdown values that your administrator manages in Admin. Setting these up before staff creates records keeps your data consistent and your reports reliable.

Track Concepts

The concepts below build on one another: providers offer services, people are enrolled in those services, each service interaction is documented, and funding sources pay for what's delivered.

Provider vs. Parent Organizations

There are two types of provider records in Casebook: Parent Organizations and Providers. Both are considered providers, and both appear in Track, but they serve different purposes.

A Parent Organization is an umbrella organization that manages one or more Providers. For example, a nonprofit that runs five daycare centers would be a Parent Organization. Its record holds organization-wide information such as headquarters address, EIN, accreditation, and contract status, and its layout is slightly different from a Provider's.

A Provider is a smaller establishment that delivers services as a singular entity or even a distinct, physical location, such as a single daycare center or a single nursing home. Providers are where services live. You do not need to have a Parent Organization for every provider; providers can exist in Casebook without them.

Services can only be added to Providers, not to Parent Organizations. If a Parent Organization delivers services, create a Provider record for each location that delivers them and link those Providers to the Parent Organization. You can make the link from either record.

Service Offerings & Service Types

A service offering is a service built on a Provider record in Track. Think of your service offerings as the menu of services you can refer or enroll people into, such as "Individual Therapy" at a counseling clinic or "Emergency Food Box" at your agency's food pantry.

Each service offering describes what the service is and how it is delivered and measured:

• Type: A general category for the service, such as Therapy, Consultation, or Educational Program. Types let you group and compare similar services across providers in reporting.
• Unit of Delivery and Service Measurement: How the service is counted, such as sessions, hours, meals delivered, or bed nights. Clear units are what make "500 units delivered" meaningful in a report.
• Method of Delivery: How people receive the service, such as in person, telehealth, or home visits.
• Language: The language or languages the service is offered in.
• Unit Cost: The cost of one unit, used to calculate the total cost of enrollments and service notes.
• Capacity: The maximum number of people the service can support, along with current capacity, which can be updated automatically as people are enrolled and served or entered manually.

Related services can also be organized into Service Groups, such as a Family Strengthening group that includes parenting classes, family counseling, and home visits.

Service Rosters

Service Rostering is a setting you can enable on a service offering to speed up documentation for services with a set list of attendees, such as a class or cohort. When rostering is turned on, everyone enrolled in that service is automatically included on every service note for it, so staff don't have to add each person to the note individually.

A person counts as enrolled for rostering when their service enrollment has a status of In Progress and a planned end date in the future. Rostered participants are included on the service note even when the note is created from a different person's intake or case, or from the provider record.

Service Enrollments

A service enrollment connects a person to a service offering. Think of it as the person's plan of services: it documents high-level information about their involvement, such as planned start and end dates, the number of service units, unit and total cost, frequency, method of delivery, the person providing the service, and status. An enrollment can represent a service that is planned, in progress, or completed, or a referral to an outside provider.

Where staff create enrollments depends largely on whether your organization uses cases:

• Engage or Intake (Service Plan section): When people are served through a case or an intake report, enroll them there to keep services connected to that record.
• Track (Clients section of the Provider record): When your work isn't case-based, enroll people directly from the provider.

Wherever an enrollment is created, it appears in the Service Plan on the person's profile.

Service Interactions

A service interaction is a single instance of a service being delivered, such as one therapy session, one class, or one food box distributed. If a service enrollment is the plan, service interactions are the daily log of what actually happened.

Service interactions are documented with Notes (that have a type of “Service Note”). A “service note” captures session-specific information such as the date, start and end times, attendance, units delivered, and cost, along with a narrative about the interaction. A single note can include multiple people, which makes it practical for group sessions, and staff can record attendance and a personal note for each person on it.

Service notes can be created from an enrollment in the Service Plan section of an intake or case, from the provider record, or from the Notes section of a record. Creating the note from an enrollment is recommended, because notes created from the Notes section may not be associated with an enrollment, which makes it harder to compare what was planned with what was delivered. Conversely, some customers may choose to do this purposefully to track ad hoc services they are providing that don’t require an “enrollment” from their organization’s perspective. We discuss choosing a service delivery tracking method further in a section below, “Putting it All Together: Choosing the Right Approach to Service Delivery Tracking.”

Funding Sources

A funding source represents a grant, contract, or other fund that pays for services. Each funding source records the funder, the fund amount, the dates the fund is valid, optional labels (such as Federal or Homeless Program), and a description.

You link service offerings to a funding source. As staff enroll people and document service notes for those services, the total cost of each enrollment or note is drawn down against the fund, as long as its dates fall within the fund's date range. This gives you an ongoing view of how much of each fund has been spent and how many people it has served.

Keep these principles in mind:

• Each service offering can be associated with only one fund.
• Spend-down is based on the Total Cost of the enrollment or service note, not on the number of people on a note.
• Accurate dates on enrollments and service notes are essential, because they determine whether a delivery counts against a fund.
• If a fund's dates are edited later, spend-down is recalculated using the new dates.

Putting it All Together: Choosing the Right Approach to Service Delivery Tracking

Casebook offers three paths to service tracking. Each adds detail on top of the one before it, so start with the simplest path that meets your reporting needs and go further only when you need to.

Path 1: Cases & People. Track cases and the people on them without recording individual services. This works when you mainly need counts of cases or people over a period. To report on households and individuals separately, set up each case as one household and add each person to it.

Path 2: Service Enrollments. Add service offerings in Track and enroll people into them. Each enrollment represents one person in one service. Choose this path when you need to show participation in specific programs but don't need to log each session/instance of service utilization.

Path 3: Enrollments + Service Notes. Enroll people in services and log a service note each time a service is delivered. The enrollment describes the structure of the service; each note records what happened in a specific session. Choose this path when you need to report on attendance, hours delivered, per-session costs, or frequency of engagement, or when you're drawing down funding based on deliveries. For classes and cohorts, enable Service Rostering to keep documentation quick.

Alongside choosing a path, consider who delivers the service, because it determines how you structure your directory:

• Your own staff: Create a Provider record for your organization, or for each internal department or program, and add the services your staff provide.
• Partners you manage under contract or license: Create a Provider record for each partner location and link them to a Parent Organization where appropriate, so you can manage licenses, contracts, and tasks alongside the services they deliver.
• Outside organizations you refer to: Create Provider records for the organizations you refer people to, or add general "external" services to your own organization's provider record when you don't need to track the specific outside provider.

Many organizations combine these approaches. For example, an agency might deliver case management internally, refer families to an external counseling partner, and run a weekly rostered parenting class, each paid for by a different funding source. Other customers may track Service Notes on certain enrolled services and then ad-hoc interactions (via Service Notes too) without a corresponding enrollment on a case (ad hoc interactions could be things like drop-in services, etc.). For a detailed walkthrough of each path, including setup steps and the reporting datasets to use, see Choosing the Right Approach to Service Delivery Tracking.