What to ask a back-up care vendor

Every vendor in this category will show you an app. The app is not the product. The product is whether someone shows up at 7am on the worst morning of your employee's month — and almost nothing in a standard demo tells you that.

Here is what to ask instead. We've included the answers that should worry you, including where they'd worry you about us.

The two questions that matter most

1. What is your fill rate, and how do you define it?

Fill rate is confirmed bookings divided by requests. It is the single number that describes whether the benefit works. Anything above 90% is good; anything below 80% means your employees will learn not to rely on it, and a benefit people don't rely on doesn't get used.

Worrying answers: "We don't track it that way." "It varies by market" without a number. Any definition that excludes requests the family cancelled after a long wait — that's the failure being reclassified as a customer decision.

2. What is your median time from request to confirmation, for same-day requests?

Not average — median, and specifically for same-day, because that's the majority of real usage. Under 90 minutes is the standard to hold someone to.

Worrying answers: An average that includes bookings made three weeks ahead. "Within 24 hours" as a service level, which in practice means your employee has already taken the day.

Coverage and failure

3. What happens when nobody accepts the job?

There should be a human step and then a reimbursement step. If the answer ends at "we notify the family," the failure mode is that your employee is left where they started, having wasted two hours believing they were covered.

4. Is reimbursement available from day one, or only when you fail?

Reimbursement — the employee uses their own person and gets paid back — is the most useful thing in a thin network. Vendors who treat it as an admission of failure make it slow and grudging. Ask how long payment takes and what the daily cap is.

5. Can an employee book care at an address that isn't their own?

Sounds trivial. It is the single most common gap for elder care, where the person needing help lives forty minutes away or in another state. Ask them to show it on the demo.

6. What's your coverage for adult and senior care specifically?

Child back-up care is a mature product; everyone is competent at it. Elder care is where demand is growing fastest and where centre-based networks don't help. Ask for fill rate on adult in-home requests separately — if they can't produce it, they probably don't have volume.

Safety

7. Can anyone override the vetting process, and is it logged?

There should be exactly one role that can, always with a recorded written reason. "Our ops team can approve exceptions" without a logging answer means, under supply pressure, that somebody will.

8. How often are background checks re-run, and what happens on expiry?

Twelve months, with automatic suspension on expiry. The risk in this category is rarely the caregiver who was never checked — it's the one checked two years ago.

9. What is a caregiver explicitly not allowed to do?

You want a crisp list: no medication administration, no wound care, no lift transfers, no driving anyone. Vagueness here means the boundary is being decided in the moment, in someone's home, by a person under pressure.

10. Walk me through your last serious incident.

The best question on this list. You are not looking for a clean record — at any volume, one doesn't exist. You are looking for a vendor who can describe a specific incident, the timeline, and what changed afterwards. A vendor who has never had one is either very small or not telling you.

Data and reporting

11. What can my HR team see about a specific booking?

The correct answer is: that it happened, what it cost, and which entitlement it consumed. Not who was cared for, not medical details, not the caregiver's notes. Ask whether that's enforced technically or by policy — the second one fails eventually.

12. What does the utilisation report actually contain?

Ask for a sample. You want days of work saved, utilisation by care type, cost per employee, and fill rate. If the report is a usage count with no outcome measure, you will have nothing to say at renewal.

Commercial

13. What's the total cost at my headcount, including everything?

Platform fee, per-use fee, implementation, and whatever else. If the answer requires an RFP, you have learned something about how the rest of the relationship will go.

14. How long from signature to first booking, and what's on my side?

Two weeks is achievable. Two quarters is common. The difference is almost never technical — it's census files and legal review, both of which you can start early if someone tells you to.

Where these questions land on us

We'd score well on fill-rate transparency, on the reimbursement path, on adult care, and on the vetting-override answer. We'd score badly on the last serious incident question, because we're early and don't have the volume to have had one — which is a real limitation, not a virtue. And we can't yet hand you a SOC 2 Type II report.

Ask us anyway. The point of the list is that a vendor's willingness to answer it is itself most of the signal.