Nobody tells you that keeping a parent at home means becoming the scheduler, the bookkeeper and the payroll department.
One shared place for the schedule, recorded clock-ins, medications, care notes, hours, expenses and updates. For Mom or Dad, at their home or yours. Whether you hire caregivers or take turns yourselves.
Family Care Conductor gives your family one shared place for the schedule, recorded clock-ins, medications, care notes, hours, expenses and updates. For Mom or Dad, at their home or yours. Whether you hire caregivers or take turns yourselves.
$49 a month per care circle · No credit card to start
- $49 a month per care circle
- Unlimited family and caregivers
- No credit card to start
Clock-in recorded
Nichelle · 12:17 PM
Yesterday's brief
Quiet day. 7 doses recorded.
A week of care, in one place.
Scheduled shifts, recorded clock-ins, medications, care notes, family updates, an optional daily brief, Shift SOS when a caregiver cannot make it, and the optional GPS tracker. Captioned, so sound off is fine.
Right now, you're the system.
The schedule is in your head and in a text thread. The caregiver's notes are in a spiral notebook on the counter, and you are the only one who reads it. The hours are on a timesheet you add up on Sunday night. The receipts are in a pile. You know Mom's medications because you made the list. You update the list. You are the list.
None of this is because you are disorganized. It is because helping a parent at home creates a coordination job, and that job landed on you while you already had one. It is true whether you hire caregivers or your family takes turns, and whether you have four siblings or none.
Family Care Conductor does not do the caring. It holds the details, so the people involved work from the same information and the person carrying the most is not also the only one who knows what is going on.
Managing caregivers
Manage your caregivers without becoming the office.
Schedules, sick calls, hours and pay, handled in the app instead of your head.
Mark the shift as needing coverage and Family Care Conductor sends the request to the other caregivers in your circle. The first one to claim it gets that shift, with no approval step from you. If nobody claims it, it escalates to you. It asks the caregivers you already have; it does not supply new people.
Set shifts up once, including recurring ones, on a shared color-coded calendar. Everyone with access sees who is expected and when, and who is recorded as on duty right now.
Caregivers clock in and out on their phone with a location check at the home. Late or missing clock-ins can alert the admin, and admins can correct an entry when something was missed. A recorded clock-in is a record, not a camera in the house.
Recorded hours become pay periods with gross-pay figures and a payroll-ready export you hand to your payroll service. Unpaid family stay out of payroll. Family Care Conductor does not pay wages, move money or file taxes.
Her side is small: clock in, tick the doses she gives, add a short note, read the previous shift's notes, clock out, and check her own hours. iPhone, Android or web. She does not see payroll, expenses or private messages unless you decide she should.
Care logs
Care logs that keep the whole circle in the loop.
What was recorded today, visible to everyone who should see it. Not just the bad days.
The medication list lives in the app with a daily checklist. Each dose a caregiver gives is recorded with a name and time, and the current list is on your phone at the next appointment. A recorded dose is a record that someone logged it, not proof a pill was swallowed.
Short, attributed notes on what Dad ate, how his mood was, whether he walked, a reading, an incident. The next caregiver walks in knowing how the morning went, and a family member three states away can read the same day.
When something matters, the person recording it marks the entry important. The circle is notified in the app, with an attempt at email and push, so a slip in the kitchen does not wait for the next phone call.
If an admin turns it on, each morning a Daily Family Brief covers the previous day, and weekly and monthly summaries look across completed periods for what repeated or changed. Written only from what your circle entered. A flagged pattern is a prompt to look closer, not a diagnosis.
AI summaries are off until an admin turns them on. Original entries are always a tap away.
The optional GPS tracker
Where is Mom right now?
A small wearable, on a lanyard or wristband, tied into your care circle. $99 once, no monthly device fee.
See the latest location the tracker reported and how long ago that was, with a recent history. A place to check when a caregiver texts that Mom went out to the garden and did not come back in.
Set a home area and get an alert when the tracker reports leaving or returning. The app shows how fresh each report is, because location depends on signal, battery and setup.
Your parent presses one button and the tracker calls the family members or caregivers you designate. Not 911, not a monitoring center.
Two-way calling means you can reach them, and they can talk with you, without expecting them to find and work a smartphone.
The tracker uses your home Wi-Fi to know when your parent is home and GPS when they are out. Home Wi-Fi presence does not give room-by-room indoor location.
The SIM card and its connectivity are included in the device price. The app's location view, alerts and history run on your Family Care Conductor subscription.
The SOS button calls designated family or caregivers, not 911 or a professional monitoring center. Family Care Conductor does not provide 24/7 emergency monitoring. The tracker is not a life-safety or medical-alert device and does not replace supervision. In an emergency, call 911.
Tracking expenses
Who paid for what, and what is still owed.
Optional expense tracking for the family that splits the cost of care.
Anyone you permit records what they spent for your parent, by category, and mileage at the rate you set. When a sibling asks what last month cost, the answer comes from records instead of a shoebox.
Attach a photo of the receipt to the entry so it is there when anyone asks.
Mark items reimbursable and then reimbursed, so there is a running answer to who is owed what. Marking something reimbursed records that it was settled; the app does not move the money.
My mom, Betty, lives with me and my boys.
For a long time she could do most things herself. Then, gradually, she could not. First cooking, then medications, then the phone, then driving. It sneaks up on you.
When it got past what I could manage around work and the kids, we looked at nursing homes. The ones we wanted had waiting lists of six months or more, so we found an opening in a memory care facility about an hour and a half away. Mom was miserable there. A couple of times she called me crying. She wanted to come home to her own routines and the animals. One of my brothers finally read her healthcare power of attorney. It said she wanted to be at home if at all possible. She had told us. We had not read it.
A local agency quoted me about $40 an hour. The same agency was advertising caregiver jobs at around $15. I had been an HR director and I already used a payroll service, so hiring directly did not scare me the way it scares a lot of families. I put up a Facebook post, asked around, and found caregivers who got to know Mom as a person. We brought her home. It was one of the best decisions we made.
Hiring people solved about half the problem. I became the administrator. Schedules, timesheets, payroll, a current medication list for every doctor who asked, and keeping my brothers and sisters informed. The caregivers kept a careful log in a notebook that almost nobody read. When a caregiver was sick, the backup plan was me. And I noticed I only called my siblings when something went wrong, so they had a picture of Mom that was mostly bad days.
I built Family Care Conductor because I needed it to exist. I remember the first morning it carried some of the weight. I was out for a walk, and at 8:01 my phone showed the caregiver's recorded clock-in. I kept walking.
If your parent is in a facility right now and you are wondering about home, you are exactly who I built this for. And if home care turns out not to be possible for your family, that is not a failure. I know Mom's needs may change to where it is not possible for us either. Different arrangements are right for different people. This is for the stretch where home is working and needs someone to keep up.
People ask what direct hiring costs compared to an agency. Here is my situation, with the assumptions showing.
- Paid care per week
- 62 hrs (45 weekday + 17 weekend)
- Per year
- 3,224 hrs
- What I pay caregivers
- $22 to $23 / hr
- My cost incl. employer payroll taxes (my estimate)
- about $24 / hr
- Agency quote
- $40 / hr
- Difference at my hours
- about $51,584 / yr
Not included: workers' compensation, unemployment insurance, payroll service fees, this app, and other costs of being an employer. Overtime rules vary by state. Your rates, hours and market will differ, and agencies take on work that a direct-hire family does itself, including finding and covering staff. This is my comparison, not a promise.
Don't take our word for it.
Listen to what families and caregivers using the app have to say. Names shortened for privacy.
“This has kept the caregivers and the family all involved. Each of us can go and see exactly what happened and how the day went. Everything is right at your fingertips and so easy to find. The best part is you can star a note and it immediately sends a notification to everyone on the care team. I highly recommend!”
Raylene S.Caregiver“It's so easy to log everything and see what the last caregiver logged. Clocking in and out is a breeze and I can check my total hours any time. This app is everything you need for home healthcare! Love this app!”
Nichelle S.Caregiver
Reviews are from Family Care Conductor users and are shown as written.
One plan. Your whole care circle.
One care recipient, your parent. Unlimited family members and caregivers in the circle, with roles and permissions you control. No per-user fees, no contracts.
The best way to judge it is to run one real week through it: your actual schedule, your caregivers' actual clock-ins, one Daily Family Brief the next morning. If it makes the week easier to hold, keep going.
- Schedule and recorded clock-ins
- Shift SOS
- Medications and care notes
- Appointments and messaging
- Hours, pay periods, payroll export
- Expense and reimbursement tracking
- Optional AI daily, weekly, monthly briefs
- Family Care Tips library
No separate monthly device fee. Requires an active subscription for location, alerts and history in the app. SOS calls your designated family or caregivers, not 911; it is not a medical-alert device.
Before you start.
We do not hire caregivers. It is just family taking turns. Is this still for us?
Yes. The schedule, clock-ins, medications, care notes, appointments, messaging, expenses and summaries work the same whether the people on the schedule are paid or not. Unpaid family are kept out of payroll processing, and the payroll tools sit unused until you need them.
I am an only child. Most of this seems written for big families.
The parts that help most when it is just you are the caregiver's side (she records the shift so you do not have to ask), Shift SOS if you have more than one caregiver, and the Daily Family Brief, which is a fast way to catch up on a day you were not there for. There is nothing to coordinate with siblings if there are none.
Will my caregiver actually use it?
Her part is small: clock in, tick the doses she gives, add a short note, clock out. She can read the previous shift's notes and see her own hours. It works on iPhone and Android and on the web.
Can my siblings change records after the fact?
Only the people you allow. Every entry is attributed and time-stamped, and admins control who can add or correct records. A family member can be given read access without edit access.
What does Shift SOS do if nobody picks up the shift?
The request goes to the other caregivers in your circle first. If no one claims it, it escalates to the admins so a person can start making calls. Family Care Conductor does not supply replacement caregivers. It organizes the ask so you are not making six calls from the parking lot.
Do we have to use the AI, and what does it actually do?
No. It is off until an admin turns it on. If you use it, the Daily Family Brief covers the previous day and the weekly and monthly summaries cover completed periods. They are written from the records your circle entered and are meant to help you notice and discuss, not to diagnose. The original entries are always there to check.
Does Family Care Conductor run our payroll?
It prepares it. Recorded hours become pay periods with gross-pay figures and a payroll-ready export you hand to your payroll service or professional. Paying wages, tax filing and compliance stay with you and them. Direct hiring makes you an employer, and the app does not change that.
Is the tracker included?
No. It is an optional $99 one-time purchase, SIM included, with no separate monthly device fee. It needs an active subscription for the app's location view, alerts and history. The SOS button calls the family or caregivers you designate, not 911 or a monitoring service, and the tracker does not replace supervision.
My parent is in a facility now. Is it strange to look at this?
Not at all. Some families use the trial to think through what a week of home care would actually take: who would cover which shifts, what the medication list looks like written down, what it would cost. If the answer is that home is not the right arrangement, that is a real answer too.
What happens after the trial?
The trial is 14 days and does not need a credit card to start. After that it is $49 a month per care circle, cancel anytime. Your records are yours: you can export your data or request deletion at any time.
You are already doing the work. Let the details have a home.
Set up your care circle, invite the people who help, and run one real week through it.
Start your free 14-day trial$49 a month per care circle after the trial · No credit card to start · Cancel anytime