Casework has a shape that generic software rarely fits: a referral arrives from somewhere unpredictable, someone assesses it, a person owns it, things happen over weeks or months, and at the end a funder or a commissioner wants evidence of what changed. We build systems around that shape rather than asking your service to adopt someone else's.
Track cases from referral to outcome.
The work is being done well. The problem is that the record of it is spread across systems that were never meant to hold it, so every question about the service in aggregate — how many, how long, what happened, what changed — has to be answered by hand.
That has two costs. The obvious one is time, most visibly at reporting deadlines. The less obvious and more damaging one is that nobody sees the service clearly enough to manage it. Caseloads drift, cases go quiet without anyone noticing, and the first sign that something has been sitting untouched for eleven weeks is usually a complaint.
Off-the-shelf case management exists and sometimes fits. Where it tends not to is the two ends: how a referral arrives, which is always specific to your partners, and what an outcome means, which is defined by your funders and changes when the funding does. A system you cannot change at those two points is one you will be working around within a year.
A case record with the stages your service actually uses, ownership and assignment, SLA timers against the deadlines you are held to, notes and documents attached to the case rather than to a folder, and outcome recording defined the way your funders define it.
Referrals come in through whichever channels you actually receive them on — a form on your site or a partner's, an inbox that is processed automatically and filed against the right record, or an API where a partner organisation can push them directly.
On top of that, the reporting layer is the part that repays the project fastest. The report builder joins the related tables for you, so the recurring funder and commissioner reports are built once by your own team and then scheduled to send themselves. Caseload dashboards per worker turn managing the service into looking at a screen.
Cases, people, organisations, notes, documents and outcomes as linked datastores with your own fields and your own vocabulary. If your service says "referral" and "episode", the system says that too. This sounds cosmetic and is not — staff adoption is largely a question of whether the software speaks the language of the work.
A public or partner-facing form, an inbox that fetches and files inbound e-mail automatically including attachments, or an API endpoint for partners who can integrate. Most services need at least two of these, and the manual route never goes away entirely.
Stages with assignment, so a case always has an owner, and scheduled tasks that watch the dates you are measured on — first contact, review due, case dormant — and escalate before rather than after the breach.
Casework data is among the most sensitive a small organisation holds. Security groups scope visibility by team, service or geography; field-level permissions keep safeguarding notes away from people who do not need them; and per-column encryption protects the fields that would matter most in a breach.
Build each recurring report once, with its filters and date ranges, then schedule it. The quarterly return stops being a week of work and becomes something that arrives in an inbox — including, where the funder will accept it, in theirs.
Nothing here is written specially for this use case — it is the same platform every ActiveManage application is built from. The full feature list is on the platform page.
| Feature | What it does | Why it matters here |
|---|---|---|
| Datastores & 40+ field types | Your own entities and fields, with linked dropdowns, dates, signatures, file uploads, geolocation and conditional fields. | Outcome frameworks are specific and they change with the funding. Being able to add a field yourself is the difference between adapting and re-procuring. |
| Inbox processing | Inbound e-mail is fetched automatically and passed, with attachments, to data extraction or a custom function. | Referrals arrive by e-mail whether or not your process says they should. This files them against the right case instead of leaving them in a shared mailbox. |
| Scheduled tasks | Automated tasks at any interval — built-in features or custom functions. | Chasing reviews, flagging dormant cases and sending the reports that used to be assembled by hand. |
| Reports & summary reports | A builder that joins related tables automatically, with filters, date ranges, counts of distinct values and graph output. | Funder reporting is the recurring cost casework services most consistently underestimate. This is where the project pays for itself. |
| Auditing | Full change history with rollback, plus a chronological site-wide activity log. | For a complaint, a serious case review or an inspection, "who knew what, and when" needs an answer that is not somebody's recollection. |
| Encryption | Per-column encryption, so the data stays unreadable even if the database itself is compromised. | Applied to the specific fields whose exposure would cause real harm, rather than as a blanket claim. |
The case record, stages and one referral route, with real cases in it. Caseworkers using it in week three tells you more than any amount of specification.
The remaining referral channels, the permission model in full, and the reporting layer — usually timed to land before a reporting deadline that matters.
Reports and fields are things your own team builds afterwards. For most casework services that is the capability that matters most, because the questions change every funding round.
Mainly at the two ends. How referrals arrive is specific to your partners, and what counts as an outcome is defined by your funders and changes when the funding does. Products fix both, so services work around them. Here they are configuration, and your own team can change them.
Yes, and building them is meant to be your job rather than ours. The report builder joins the underlying tables automatically, so a report is filters and date ranges rather than a query someone has to write. They can then be scheduled to send themselves.
Layered. Security groups scope which cases a person can reach at all, field-level permissions control which columns they see within those, and per-column encryption protects specific fields at rest. Everything is audited, including who viewed what.
No, and it is the normal case. Outcomes are recorded once against the case; each funder's view is a different report over the same data, not a different set of fields to maintain.
Yes, by default. The platform is UK-built and already used by NHS trusts and public-sector organisations, so UK data residency and the assurance paperwork are routine rather than exceptional.
Tell us what you are trying to fix and we will tell you whether this is the right shape for it — including when it is not.