Repeat respite stays or returning service user

Overview

Respite care allows service users to stay at your home for a defined period, providing temporary relief for families and carers. Some service users return for multiple respite stays over time — these are known as repeat respite stays.

Found tracks each respite stay as a separate booking. This gives your team a clear, accurate occupancy history for every service user and ensures room allocation and funding records are always up to date.

This article explains how to manage repeat respite stays, from recording an initial stay through to managing subsequent returns.

Where to find it

Navigate to Operations → Bookings → Permanent & respite.

This page shows all permanent and respite bookings across your home, split into tabs:

• Current — active bookings happening right now

• Future — upcoming bookings not yet started

• Closed — bookings that have ended

• Cancelled — bookings that were cancelled before starting

• All — every booking regardless of status

You can filter and search across any of these tabs to find a specific service user or booking.

How to manage repeat respite stays

Step 1: Close the current respite stay

Open the booking record and select Manage booking → Close booking. Record an end date and a reason for the stay ending.

Once closed, the booking moves to the Closed tab, the room is freed up, and the occupancy record is complete.

Step 2: Open the service user's profile

Navigate to Operations → Service users, open the resident's profile, and go to their Bookings tab.

Step 3: Select Add booking

Any service user who has had a booking before will have an Add booking button on this tab. Select it to open the familiar booking journey, with the service user already pre-filled.

Step 4: Confirm the primary contact

Found will prompt you to reuse the primary contact from the service user's last booking. Confirm this with one click, or choose a different contact if needed.

Step 5: Complete the booking details

Continue through the booking journey as normal — entering the start date, planned end date, room, funding type, care type, and agreed fee.

Step 6: Found links an enquiry automatically

Behind the scenes, Found creates and links an enquiry to the new booking so reporting stays accurate. You don't need to do anything here — but it's worth knowing what happens:

• Attribution — the enquiry is attributed to "Previous Customer"

• Stage on creation — set based on the booking's start date:

  • Future start date → "Residency booked"

  • Start date of today or in the past → "Residency started"

• Automatic progression — the enquiry advances to "Residency started" and closes as won once the stay begins

• No noise — the enquiry is created silently, so no enquiry automations or notifications fire

If an open enquiry already exists

If the service user already has an open enquiry at that location, Found will ask you to choose:

• Link to the existing enquiry — keeps its original attribution and progresses its stage, or

• Create a new enquiry — added alongside the existing one

Once the new respite booking is in place, you can return to the resident's Bookings tab at any time to see their full history of previous, current, and future bookings.

Why managing repeat respite stays properly matters

• Accurate occupancy — each stay is recorded separately, giving you a clean history and preventing double-counting of room occupancy

• No duplicate profiles — adding the booking from the existing service user profile keeps everything tied to one resident record

• Honest attribution — the background enquiry is automatically attributed to "Previous Customer", keeping reporting on booking sources accurate

• Documents stay together — a booking's Documents tab shows its linked enquiry's documents live, so they never drift out of date. The service user's profile also has its own Documents tab, aggregating every document across all their enquiries and bookings in one place

• Clear reporting — your team can see at a glance how many times a service user has stayed, what care they received, and what funding was in place on each occasion

• Planning and forecasting — the Future tab gives visibility of upcoming respite bookings, so you can prepare in advance and manage room availability effectively

• Pathway to permanent — if a respite service user decides to move in permanently, Found allows you to convert the active respite booking to a permanent booking directly from the Manage booking menu. This closes the respite booking and creates a new permanent booking from the chosen date, preserving the service user's history