Coverage: time away and looking after others

What it's about

Some members of your household can't be left on their own: a young child without a login, an older relative who needs help, or the dog. patchio warns you when there is a day on which nobody is around to look after them. The Coverage card on the dashboard then lists the open gaps.

Why it's here

In households where both partners work and travel a lot, it's easy to miss: one trip is in the calendar, the other is too, and only the evening before does it dawn on you that nobody is looking after the shared dog. patchio shows you the gap early, worked out from the events that are in your calendar anyway.

Coverage is deliberately a warning, not a required field. You can always create an away-from-home event, even if the care isn't sorted yet. Often the trip is fixed first and the care gets arranged afterwards. A required field would hold you up while you're entering the trip; the warning keeps reminding you until you've dealt with it.

How it works

1. Enter the time away. Create a calendar event and tick Away from home under “Advanced”. The people assigned to it count as not at home during that time (more in Create an event).

2. Mark “Needs care”. You can do this in two places:

• For a resource (for example a pet), tick Needs care under Manage → Resources. There you also choose who counts as a carer. If nobody is selected, everyone in the household counts. More on entities under Resources.
• For a person (child, older relative), the tick box is called This person needs supervision; this is where you set the carers. Create children without their own login as a passive profile. Without any carers selected, no warning is created for a person.

3. When the warning appears. patchio looks at the next 14 days. For each day it checks whether at least one of the possible carers is not away. If the resource belongs to a residence, the carer also has to be there on that day (see Rotation plan and Residences). If all possible carers are away, a gap appears for that period. Several days in a row are combined into one gap.

4. Resolve the gap. Tap the gap on the Coverage card and note who is taking care of it (“Neighbour feeds them morning and evening”). From your directory you can pick external carers such as babysitters or grandparents as a quick selection (see Babysitters). The gap turns green and is marked resolved. If you remove the note, the warning comes back.

You can also sort out the care while creating the away-from-home event: under Care while away, tick the resource as taken care of and add a comment.

Good to know

• External carers from the directory only show up as a quick selection when resolving a gap. They don't count towards whether a gap arises.
• Merely being present doesn't make anyone a carer. Only people listed as carers count.
• The card only appears when there are gaps.

In practice

Two working parents share a dog. The dog is set up as a resource with Needs care, and both parents are carers. They each enter their business trips as “Away from home”. When both trips overlap on a weekend, the warning shows up on the dashboard. They ask the neighbour, enter her at the gap, and the card shows “resolved”.