Every care home software company says it was built with care homes. It costs nothing to say, so on its own it tells you nothing.

Here is what it means for us, in the only form you can check. What managers told us. What we built because of it. And what we still have not built, which is the part that makes the claim worth anything.

We asked first, and we published the answers

Most software gets built the other way round. Someone builds what looks good in a demo, then goes looking for someone to sell it to.

We started with conversations. UK care home managers, talking about what actually slows a week down. Not what you say to a software company, but what gets in the way on a Tuesday. Paper records nobody can find fast enough. A rota that falls apart the moment someone calls in sick. A medication chart that cannot tell you whether a dose was given or just never written down.

Then we ran it properly as a survey and published the results, including the answers that were awkward for us.

What they said, and what it turned into

  • Care documentation came first. It was ranked top for improvement and took more staff time than anything else. So a caregiver records a note against a resident during the shift, from the phone, and every note for that resident sits in one place.
  • The rota was the most frustrating task. Two thirds named it. So a manager sets up shift templates once and generates shifts from them across a date range.
  • Last-minute cover takes minutes and ruins mornings. It was the shortest task in the survey and one of the three most frustrating. So a cover request now attaches to the shift that needs filling, instead of living in a phone call nobody recorded.
  • Compliance: gather the evidence, leave the decision. It was the one task managers said they would not hand to software. So we collect the evidence and leave the sign-off alone. Reading it and standing behind it stays with you.

What we have not built

This is the part that makes "built with" mean something.

Every manager we asked wanted predictive risk alerts, flagging residents at higher risk of falls or deterioration. We do not have that. Alerts today run on rules an administrator sets, which is a different and smaller thing, and we would rather say so than let a demo imply otherwise. A family updates app is being built now, and we are not giving you a date for it. Billing we do not do at all, and we are not planning to, because managers ranked it last.

What this means if you call us

You will be talking to Robert, who runs Granily. Not a call centre, and not a suggestion box nobody reads. If something is missing that would genuinely help your home, he is the person who decides whether it gets built.

Being early cuts both ways, and it is worth being straight about that. Fewer homes run on Granily than on the systems that have been around for twenty years. Some things are missing. The other side of it is that what you ask for can still change what gets built next, which stops being true once a product has thousands of customers and a roadmap set two years out.

Built with UK care home managers is not a slogan for us. It is the only way we know how to build something people will actually use.