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“Using Okappy really cuts down the time it takes to produce, check and submit our reports to the local council from weeks to minutes.”
Graham Gardiner, Chief Executive, Age UK Lambeth

Age UK is a registered charity in the United Kingdom, formed in 2009 through a merger of the operations of Age Concern England and Help the Aged. It is now the UK’s largest charity for older people.

In the UK, they help millions of people every year, providing support, companionship and advice. They also campaign for older people, championing their rights, needs and wishes. The Age UK network is a partnership of independent charities which includes our national partners, over 120 local Age UKs, and hundreds of smaller organisations called Age UK Friends and Forums. They also have an international subsidiary which works in over 30 developing countries and is a member of the HelpAge global network and the Disasters Emergency Committee.

More than 70 local Age UKs also operate handyperson services across much of the country. These services offer older people extra help with small practical jobs to make their lives easier and safer around the home.  Services include

• Small repairs – putting up curtain rails, shelves and pictures
• Safety measures – fitting smoke alarms, carbon monoxide detectors and grab rails
• Home security – door and window locks, door chains and door viewers
• Energy efficiency checks – installing draught excluders, radiator heat reflectors and energy efficient lightbulbs

The Lambeth Age UK handyperson service gets funding from Lambeth Council. As such,  they have to provide reporting to the council covering details such as

• tasks completed each month,
• the age sex and health of the recipient,
• quality of the service, and the
• location and property type of the recipients of the service.

Compiling these reports was very manually intensive. It was taking considerable time, time that could be better spent managing the service. Information was also often outdated and difficult to find which meant responding to calls took longer.

Graham approached Okappy in order to provide a more efficient and automated way to store information, assign jobs to the Handy persons and then see in real time when the jobs were done. The final step was to automate the compilation of the reporting to Lambeth Council.

Age UK Lambeth joined the Okappy platform and invited their handy persons to connect. A job template was then created which had the key fields required for the management of each job and the reporting to the council.

The handyperson team receive phone calls for handy fix jobs. They can quickly raise a job on Okappy, and then allocate it to the relevant handy person. The handy person gets an automatic notification that a new job has been received on their  mobile phone.  They can open their app and see all the jobs assigned to them with details of what is required.

They can do the task and update the job on the mobile phone with a minimum number of clicks. Back in the office, Age UK Lambeth can see in real time what jobs have been done and following up with any that are running late or may have been forgotten.

The Okappy team also designed a google sheets spreadsheet which automatically pulls the jobs data from the Okappy system and populates the relevant tabs as per Lambeth Council’s requirements. The spreadsheet is checked at the end of each month and then sent to Lambeth Council.

Automating the compilation of the spreadsheet saves countless hours each week and ensures more accurate reporting

“It makes a big improvement in the time spent compiling reports.” Cat Cleary, S.A.I.L Gateway Lead, Age UK Lambeth

“With Okappy, it is so much easier to find information and view information especially given the highlighted colours of the employees on the jobs dashboard”, Sue Taylor, Age UK