Using the MHLC app

Where everything lives

The main destinations sit in a navigation bar that follows you around. On a computer it is the dark strip of icons down the left-hand edge; on a phone it is the row of buttons across the bottom. Same five things either way: 📊 Home, 💬 Chats, ✅ Tasks, 📋 Reports, and ⋯ More.

⋯ More is the last icon, and it holds everything that is about you rather than about a destination — status, settings, password, admin portal, sign out, and the version number this device is running.

What	Where
Dashboard	📊 Home in the side strip / bottom bar
Chat	💬 Chats
Tasks	✅ Tasks
Shift reports, incidents, intakes	📋 Reports (the Submissions view)
Set your status	⋯ More → 🟢 Set status
Text size and other settings	⋯ More → 🎛 Settings
Change your password	⋯ More → 🔑 Change password
Which version you are running	⋯ More → the number at the bottom of the menu
New task	➕ at the top of any task list, on the Dashboard or the Tasks tab
Export to Excel	Submissions → ⬇ Export to Excel, beside the filters
Export one report as PDF	Open the submission → Export PDF
Post an announcement	In a chat → ✚ beside the message box → 📢 Post an announcement
House calendar	Open a house chat → ✚ → 📅 House calendar
Complete a shift report	Open a house chat → ✚ → 📝 Complete shift report
Medication sign off	Open a house chat → ✚ → 💊 Medication sign off
Who is in a chat	Open the chat → ⋮ → 👥 Who's here
Search inside a conversation	Open the chat → 🔍 at the top right
Sheets — shared spreadsheets	🧮 Sheets in the side strip — on a phone inside ⋯ More
Updates — task comments, @mentions, sheets shared with you	🔔 at the top right — on a phone ⋯ More → 🔔 Updates
SMS, Notes, HR and the rest	⚙ in the side strip — on a phone they are listed inside ⋯ More
How to use the app	⋯ More → 📖 How to use the app

1 · Getting started

Works on a phone and on a computer, and you can use both. On a computer just open hub.myhomelivingcare.com/staff — no install needed.

On a phone, follow hub.myhomelivingcare.com/install to add it to your home screen. Worth doing even if you mostly work at a desk: notifications for messages and task assignments only reach you reliably once it is installed.

Your username is your email address. The temporary password is MHLC1234 unless you were given a different one. You will be asked to choose your own password the first time you sign in.

2 · The Dashboard

Where: 📊 Home in the side strip or the bottom bar.

On a computer this is where you land when you sign in — chat and tasks side by side, so you are not clicking between them all day.

• The chat panel is the same live chat as the Group Chat tab — same messages, same place.
• The task rows beside it are your open work. Click one to open it.
• You can create and edit tasks straight from here — no need to switch tabs.

3 · Tasks

Where: ✅ Tasks in the side strip or the bottom bar, or the task rows on the Dashboard. The views are buttons across the top of the task list.

The views

View	What is in it
My tasks	Assigned to you.
Team board	Everyone's shared work. Private tasks never appear here.
🔒 Private	Private tasks you are part of — created by you, assigned to you, or shared with you.
Archive	Completed tasks, searchable.

Unclaimed tasks

A task nobody is assigned to shows an Unclaimed flag and an 🙋 I'll take it button. Unclaimed tasks sit at the top of their column on the Team board, and at the top of the Team panel on the Dashboard, until someone takes them — then they move into the list like any other task and appear on that person's My tasks.

Creating a task

Several people on one task

• The person in the Assigned to box is the one shown on the card; everyone ticked under + Add more people is on it too.
• Everyone on it has to mark it done before the task closes. The card shows how many have, for example “2 of 3 done”.
• Change who is on it from ✏️ Edit, or from the people button on the open task. Everyone added is notified; anyone taken off is told it was taken off them.
• A repeating task keeps everyone on every new copy.

What the other person sees

When you assign a task, a card appears in your direct message with that person saying you assigned it, and they get a notification. When it is completed, the same conversation says so. You can mark a task done straight from that card.

Comments

Every task has its own comments, and that is where the record of the work belongs. Type @ to pull someone in — they get notified. Status changes are logged there automatically, so the history of a task is in one place.

The most recent comment now shows on the task card itself, on one line, with the first name of whoever wrote it. You can see what state a task is in while scanning the board, without opening every one to find out. Open the task for the full thread.

Recurring tasks

A task can repeat daily, weekly or monthly. The system creates each new instance on the day. Recurring instances deliberately do not post chat cards — otherwise a daily task would fill a conversation.

4 · Chat

Where: 💬 Chats in the side strip or the bottom bar, or the chat panel on the Dashboard — they are the same conversations.

You can message anyone, and you see the house chats for the houses you are assigned to.

• Search above the chat list finds a conversation or a person you have never messaged — pick them and it starts the conversation. The ✕ at the end of the box clears it in one go.
• 🔍 in a conversation searches what was said inside it.
• On a phone, swipe down on the chat list to refresh it. It works on the list, not inside a conversation, where new messages arrive by themselves.
• @ tags someone, ↩ replies to a specific message, 🙂 reacts — ＋ at the end of the row of faces opens more, with a search box.
• Press and hold a message (or its ⋯) for 📋 Copy text, reply, forward, pin, and turning it into a task.
• ✚ attaches a photo or PDF. On a computer you can also drag a file onto the conversation, or paste a screenshot straight in.
• ⋮ gives you Who's here, the notification sound and muting. The actions — calendar, shift report, medication sign off, announcements, cover requests — moved to ✚.

Reading a busy conversation

The chat was reworked to behave the way people already expect a messaging app to behave:

• Messages are separated by day — Today, Yesterday, then the date.
• Several messages in a row from the same person are grouped, with the name shown once instead of on every line.
• A conversation with unread messages opens at the unread line rather than at the bottom, so you pick up where you stopped. It holds still once you are there.
• A ⌄ button appears when you scroll up — it takes you back to the newest message.

Sending, and knowing it landed

• On a computer, Enter sends and Shift+Enter starts a new line.
• On a phone, return starts a new line — tap ➤ to send. Phone keyboards have no Shift+Enter, and losing half a message to a stray return was the more expensive mistake.
• Under your own message: ✓ Sent means nobody has opened it; ✓✓ Seen by 2 of 5 counts who has. Tap it for the names.
• Press and hold a message on a phone to open its menu, the same one ⋯ opens.

5 · Announcements and shift cover

Announcements

Where: open the chat, tap ✚ beside the message box, then 📢 Post an announcement.

You can post an announcement into a house chat or a group — it appears as a banner above the conversation for everyone, and you can see who has read it. Use it for things that must not scroll away. Dismissing one does not delete it; anyone can bring it back with the 📢 Announcements button.

Shift cover

When a worker asks for cover, a card appears in the house chat. Support Workers volunteer; you confirm who gets it. Nobody is locked in until you do.

The request now has to say whether the shift is SIL, CP, or both — a worker cannot post one without answering. A CP shift also names whose outing it is, chosen from the residents of that house, so whoever offers knows who they would be supporting. Both appear on the card, in the chat message itself, and on the unclaimed task the request raises.

Requests raised before 20 August 2026 show no SIL or CP marking, because nobody was asked at the time — they are blank rather than guessed at.

6 · Shift reports and incidents

Where: 📋 Reports in the side strip or the bottom bar.

It shows shift reports, incident reports, medication records and intakes for the houses and people you are assigned to. Filter by type, house, region or client. The list now uses the full width of the screen, so more of each row is readable before you open it.

⬇ Export to Excel sits beside the filters and gives you exactly what you are looking at — whatever filters are on, apply to the file. To export one report on its own, open it and use Export PDF inside it.

Choosing dates

From and To sit beside the house and client filters — for example 1 September to 30 September for a month’s reports. The list and the Excel export both follow them. ✕ Any date clears them.

The exported file is named after what is in it — who, what and when:

With no client chosen it starts with the house, or All clients. With no dates chosen it still shows the first and last day the records in the file actually cover.

Linking a form to a client

Some forms are filled in before the person is a client — the food preference form, sent from a lead, has their name typed in. Once they are a client, open the record in 📋 Reports and use 🔗 Link to a client at the top. It then shows under that client in Reports and the export, and counts on their onboarding checklist. You can Change or remove the link later; the record’s earlier version is kept, as with any edit. Forms that ask which client they are about (and shift reports) do not offer it.

Shift reports from 1 October

Support workers now answer most of each resident’s questions as one tick list — tick what happened, leave the rest. The report you read, and the export, look the same as before: every question keeps its own heading, and anything left unticked reads Not during this shift (daily living) or No (everything else).

A signature drawn on a form is embedded in the PDF, with the time it was signed underneath. Photos and other attachments are not — they stay in the app.

Incident reports

Staff open the form from ✚ → ⚠️ Incident report in a house chat. It also has its own link, which works without signing in: hub.myhomelivingcare.com/incident-report — someone who is not signed in types the client’s full name instead of picking it from a list.

New from 1 October 2026:

• Witnesses — Were there any witnesses? then the witness’s name (required), email and contact number (both optional; the number is digits only, so it keeps its leading 0 in the export).
• Who was injured? — asked when someone was: the client, another client, a staff member or someone else.
• Type of incident now says what happened: Injury to client and Staff injury are gone (the injury question covers them), and Self-harm, Health concern, Unsafe item or hazard found and Privacy or professional boundaries are new — they were the most common things typed under Other. Reports from before keep the type they were given, so when you count self-harm across months, older ones may say Injury to client or Other.
• Emergency services replaces Was the incident reported to Police?: Were emergency services called? then tick Police, Ambulance and/or Fire brigade. Police asks for the station and report number; Ambulance asks whether the client went to the emergency department and which hospital; Fire brigade asks whether they provided a report. To count police involvement across 1 October, read both: the old Yes/No question on earlier reports, and Police among the ticks on later ones.
• Police report number is optional — it is rarely known when the report is written. The residence question is now required, so every report has a location.
• Restrictive practice, its own section after injuries: was one used, which of the five kinds, whether it is in the client’s behaviour support plan (Yes, No or Not sure), why, how long in minutes, and what was done to reduce or stop it.

The manager review — reportable incidents

NDIS reportable incident type is now tick boxes, because one incident can be more than one type — an assault that causes a serious injury is both. The list is the NDIS’s own:

• Death of a person with disability
• Serious injury
• Abuse or neglect
• Unlawful physical contact or assault
• Unlawful sexual contact or assault
• Sexual misconduct against or in the presence of a person with disability (including grooming)
• Unauthorised use of a restrictive practice (not authorised or not in the behaviour support plan)

Medication sign off

This replaces the paper medication chart. A Support Worker opens a house chat, taps ✚ → 💊 Medication sign off, ticks which residents the record is for, fills in a section per resident, and signs with a finger. The signature and the time it was drawn are both part of the record.

Records land in 📋 Reports alongside shift reports, and export the same way.

What the team sees in the chat

Submitting a shift report posts a card into the house chat. If the same worker also completed a medication sign off during that shift, the card lists it underneath, with the residents' names — so the house can see what was done without opening anything.

Whatever the worker types in "Information to hand over to next staff" is posted into the house chat too. That field is required — a shift report cannot be submitted with it blank.

7 · House calendars

Open a house chat, then ✚ → 📅 House calendar. You see the house's own calendar plus a calendar for each resident, colour-coded, with the house in grey and each resident in their own colour. Tap a name at the top to show or hide just that one.

8 · Setting your status

Where: tap ⋯ More — the last icon in the side strip on a computer, or the last button in the bottom bar on a phone — then 🟢 Set status.

Your status appears beside your name in chat and in the people list, so colleagues know before they message you rather than after. Once the end time you chose passes, it disappears by itself — nobody has to remember to clear it.

Already away? A status can also be set on your behalf from 🧑‍💼 HR → Employees — for the case where you are already on leave and cannot do it yourself. When that happens the status says set by and the name of whoever set it, and you can change or clear it yourself at any time.

9 · 🍽️ Meals, stock take and shopping

Where: the 🍽️ icon in the side strip, or ⋯ More on a phone. Pick the house at the top right; the screen remembers which one you were on.

The weekly loop runs like this. A house counts what is in its cupboards, the count becomes a shopping list, the list arrives with you to order, and whoever is on shift when the bags land ticks them off. The meal plan for the week sits alongside it.

Your part is the middle of that: 🏢 Office queue.

Ordering, for back office

The item list

There is one catalogue for the whole company, and each house has its own list drawn from it. Keeping one spelling per product is what stops the same thing being ordered under three names — so search before you add, and if you type a name that already exists the hub uses the existing one and tells you so.

On the ⚙ Item list tab you add items to a house and take them off it. The same two controls are on the stock take screen itself, at the top right, for when you notice something mid-count.

Meal plans

🍽️ Meal plan is the week, seven days by five meals. Dishes are ranked by what that house actually cooks, so its regulars are at the top; anything not in the list can be typed in. Per-resident changes (“Bruce: no peas”) sit under the meal, where whoever is cooking will read them. The week is also reachable from the 🍽️ button in the house's own chat.

10 · 📱 SMS — texting from the hub

Texts to and from the business mobile appear here, as conversations, so the whole office can see what was said and reply without passing the handset around. Open it from ⚙ in the side strip, or from ⋯ More on a phone.

Sending

Finding something someone texted

The search box at the top — “Search names, numbers and messages…” — narrows the list of conversations by name or number as you type. From two letters on, a Messages section underneath lists every text that contains what you typed, in any conversation, newest first, with the words highlighted. Tap one and the conversation opens at that text, which flashes so you can find it.

When the phone goes quiet

The phone checks in about once a minute, day and night. If it has not for 15 minutes, the banner at the top of SMS becomes a card:

• Work down the three checks on the business phone. The battery is the best clue: a good battery usually means the phone restarted and MacroDroid did not start again; a low one usually means it is flat.
• Tap Got it — I’m checking so everyone else can see that somebody is on it.
• Nothing is lost while it is quiet. Texts you send wait, and go out by themselves once the phone is back; the card disappears when it checks in again.

Knowing it got there

A line under each message you send says where it is up to:

• 🕘 Queued — written down, waiting for the phone to collect it
• 📤 Handed to the phone — the phone has it
• ✓ Sent — it left the phone
• ✓✓ Delivered — it reached their handset
• ✕ Failed — with a Try again button. Worth checking the number before retrying

Replies, and out of hours

Replies land in the same conversation and the unread count goes up, the same as chat. At the top of the screen it tells you whether the office is open or closed right now — when it is closed, somebody texting in gets an automatic reply saying when you will be back, and they only ever get that once in a day however many times they write.

Picture messages

If someone sends a photo to the business number, you will see a line across the conversation:

The photo itself is not in the hub. You will know who sent one and when, and to see it you have to pick up the business phone. That is a limit of the phone, not a setting — it cannot hand a picture over the way it hands over a text.

Very occasionally you may see “A message arrived that the hub could not read” instead. That means something came in that could not be captured — read it on the phone, the same way.

11 · 🗒 Notes

A scratchpad that belongs to you — a phone number to keep for an hour, what you were part-way through when the phone rang. On a computer it is the 🗒 in the header, so it opens beside whatever you were doing; on a phone it is its own screen under ⋯ More.

Notes save as you type. They are the one thing in the hub you can genuinely delete.

12 · 🎓 Training

Training assigned to you appears under 🎓 Training, exactly as it does for support workers — a card per course, Open to do it, and a red number showing how many you still have to do. Your answers are kept as you go, so you can stop and come back, and it does not have to be on the same device.

If you also look after other people's training, that is the Training tab inside 🧑‍💼 HR: who has been given what, who has finished, and assigning a course or a whole pack to somebody. Assigning is silent — nobody is emailed or texted. What they get is the 🎓 icon with a number on it next time they open the app.

Seeing what someone answered

It shows the answers they gave, in the order the course asks them, the date they completed it and when it is next due, and the declaration line where the course has one. A list of statements — the induction’s “I understand that…” lists, the Code of Conduct’s sections — is shown as tick boxes under its section heading, the same in the PDF.

“Every box must be ticked”

On a course, a tick-box question in the Form Builder has a setting called Every box must be ticked. Use it for an “I understand that…” list: the person cannot carry on until every box is ticked, and the statements stay in the order you wrote them. The induction’s four lists and the Code of Conduct’s twelve sections use it.

On any form you build, a tick-box question can now open follow-up questions: in a follow-up’s settings, choose the tick-box question under Show only after another question is answered and tick which boxes it belongs to. (Not on shift report questions.)

A video that has to be watched picks up where the person left off when they come back on the same device; on another device it starts again, and so does the time they still need to watch.

13 · 🧮 Sheets

Spreadsheets inside the hub, for the lists and trackers a team works on together — like Google Sheets or Excel, but kept in the hub and shared the same way as everything else. Several people can be in one sheet at once: each change appears on everyone's screen as it is made, and the names of whoever else has it open show at the top.

Where: 🧮 Sheets in the side strip; on a phone it is in ⋯ More. It works on a phone, but a computer is much the better place to build one.

Starting a sheet

A sheet you start is yours: My sheets on the list. Sheets other people have shared with you are under Shared with me.

Sharing

Only the person who started a sheet can share it. Open it and tap 👥 Share.

• ➕ Add a person, or ➕ Add a chat — a group chat or a house chat. Sharing with a chat shares with everyone in it, and it follows the chat: someone who joins later gets the sheet, someone who leaves loses it.
• Each person or chat is Can edit or Can view. Can view means they can read it but not change anything.
• Everyone who gets the sheet is told: a 🔔 notice saying you shared it, which opens it when tapped. The same happens when someone is moved up to Can edit.

The toolbar

Button	What it does
B I U S, A▾	Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, text colour.
The three line icons	Align left, centre, right — as in Word.
The coloured squares	Highlight the cell; ✕ takes it off.
▾ Dropdown	Turns the selected column into a pick-list (below).
☑ Tick boxes	Turns the selected column into tick boxes — one click, or Space, ticks.
❄ Freeze top row	Keeps the headings in view while scrolling — for everyone.
↕ Sort	Sorts by the selected column; the heading row stays put.
＋ Row, ＋ Column, − Row, − Column	Insert or delete. Right-clicking a cell offers the same.

Dropdowns

Click a cell in the column, then ▾ Dropdown:

• Single option or Multiple options — multiple lets a cell hold several, shown side by side.
• Each option has a colour — tap the coloured square beside it. Turn Option colour off for plain text.
• ↑ ↓ reorder, 🗑 deletes, ＋ Add option adds (Enter adds the next one too).
• ＋ Add what is already in column … fills the list from what the column already holds — handy when turning an existing column into a dropdown.
• Renaming an option renames it in every cell that uses it. Deleting an option never empties a cell — the text stays, just without its colour.
• Remove dropdown makes it an ordinary column again, keeping everything in it.

Formulas

Start a cell with =, as in Excel. While you are typing one, click a cell to put it in, drag across cells for a range, or Shift+click to stretch it — each reference is outlined in its own colour. The usual ones work: SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, COUNTA, COUNTIF, SUMIF, AVERAGEIF, IF, IFERROR, VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, INDEX, MATCH, ROUND, TODAY and more.

• The fx bar above the grid shows what is actually in the selected cell — the formula, not its answer. Click it to edit.
• Select several cells and the bottom of the sheet shows their Sum · Average · Count.

Filter, and the Excel shortcuts

• ⏷ Filter (or Ctrl+Shift+L) puts a ▾ on each heading: sort, search, tick the values to show, or a condition such as contains. It only changes your screen — nobody else's view moves.
• Double-click the edge of a column letter to fit the column to its longest entry.
• Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I, Ctrl+U, Ctrl+Z (undo), Ctrl+F (search) — ⌘ instead of Ctrl on a Mac.

History, downloading, archiving

• 🕑 History shows who changed what and when; ↩ Put … back undoes a single change.
• ⬇ Excel or ⬇ CSV downloads it, named with the date — for example Fire drill log - 06.10.26.xlsx. Formulas, bold, colours and single-option dropdowns come through into Excel.
• 🗄 Archive (the owner only) takes it off everyone's list. It is kept, with its history — nothing is deleted.

14 · The other screens under ⚙

These are switched on person by person, so you will have some and not others.

Screen	What it is for
🧑‍💼 HR	Recruitment — applicants, their documents and where each one is up to — the Training tab described above, and Employees: each person's hub login — their houses and areas, which screens they have, setting their status, resetting a password, and adding someone new. (This was the 👥 Staff screen.)
Shift compliance	Which shifts have a report against them and which do not, so a missing report is found in the same week rather than at an audit.
Houses & residents	The list of houses and who lives in each.
Activity log	What was changed in the hub, and by whom.
Export records	Pulling submissions out as a spreadsheet.

My Home Living Care · hub.myhomelivingcare.com
Guides for the other roles are linked at the bottom of this page.