Case Management is for organizations that serve people directly: a food pantry, a shelter, a family services agency, a scholarship program, an after school program. It holds the people you serve, the cases you have open for them, the notes your staff write, and a log of what you actually delivered. That last piece is the one most small organizations are missing when a funder asks what their money bought.
What it is
Five things, and deliberately only five.
- The people you serve. One record per person or household, with as much or as little detail as you need. A record with nothing but a name is a perfectly good record.
- Cases. One case is one piece of work with a beginning and an end. Eviction prevention. Winter heating. A job search. Somebody can have several over the years, and each one keeps its own story.
- Case notes. What happened, what was agreed, what happens next, dated and signed with whoever wrote it.
- The service log. What was delivered, when, how much, under which program, and against which funder.
- Intake requests. What people sent through your public link, waiting for somebody here to accept or decline. Optional, and off unless you turn it on.
Where to find it
It lives at https://www.allinonenonprofit.com/case-management/ and on your My Apps page at https://app.allinonenonprofit.com. There is a public demonstration with invented records at https://www.allinonenonprofit.com/case-management/?demo=1, which needs no account and touches no real data.
Who can open it
This app is held tighter than every other app on the platform, on purpose.
Everywhere else, anyone in your organization can read and only the read-only Viewer role is stopped from writing. Here, being a member of your organization is not enough to read anything at all. Case notes describe somebody's housing, family or health situation, and that is not the same category of information as a donation record.
| Who | Can open Case Management |
|---|---|
| The organization's owner | Yes |
| A member you have marked as Admin | Yes |
| A member whose custom access list names Case Management | Yes |
| A member with full access to everything else | No, until you add it deliberately |
| A member with a preset role such as Programs or Operations | No, until you add it deliberately |
| The read-only Viewer role | No, not even to read |
To give somebody access, open My Organization, find them under People and Access, set their access to Custom, and tick Case Management. That is one deliberate action per person, which is the point.
Letting somebody in is the first decision. Which cases they then see is a second one, and it has its own setting.
Who can open which case
There are two modes, and an owner or an admin chooses between them on Case Management Settings. The setting is theirs alone: a permission the person it restricts can switch off is not a permission.
| Mode | What a caseworker sees |
|---|---|
| Everyone admitted to this app sees every case (the default) | Every case, every person on file, every service record. Assigning a case records who is responsible; it hides nothing. |
| A caseworker sees only their own cases | The cases assigned to them, plus any single case they have been added to. Everything else, including the people attached to it and the services logged against it, is not on their screen at all. |
An owner and an admin see everything in either mode. That is deliberate: somebody has to be able to answer for the whole file, and somebody has to be able to pick up a case when a caseworker leaves.
Restricted mode is off unless you turn it on, so nothing changes for an organization that never opens this setting. If you do turn it on, every screen that shows a shorter list says so plainly rather than presenting a partial list as the whole one.
Adding one person to one case
In restricted mode, every case grows a Who else is on this case card. An owner or an admin can add a colleague there, which lets them open that one case and nothing else. It is the answer to "my supervisor needs to see the Vega file" without handing over the cabinet.
Only an owner or an admin can add somebody. If a restricted caseworker could add people to a case, they could add themselves to every case, and the mode would be decoration.
A note only some people can read
Every note has a Keep this note restricted box. A restricted note can be read by the person who wrote it, and by an owner or an admin. Nobody else, including the caseworker the case is assigned to.
That is stricter than it first sounds, and it is the right shape: the reason to write a restricted note is usually something one worker was told in confidence, and "everybody on the case can read it" would defeat the purpose. A restricted note carries a gray Restricted tag so the person who can read it is never in doubt about who else can.
Somebody who cannot read a restricted note is not told it exists. It is left out of the case, out of the note count, and out of the "last note" date, because a date on its own would advertise it.
A public link people can ask for help through
Off unless you turn it on. When it is on, your organization has one link you can print on a flyer, put on your website, or hand to a partner agency, and anyone can use it to describe what they need. There is no account and no sign-in: somebody asking a nonprofit for help should never have to become a user of a software platform first.
Turn it on under Case Management Settings, where you will also find the link itself and a box for a short introduction. Write who you serve and what happens next, in your own words. "We serve Palm Beach County. Somebody will call you within two business days" saves a great many wasted requests and a great many disappointed people.
Nothing they send becomes a record on its own
Every submission lands in Intake Requests and waits. It is not a person on file. It is not a case. It does not appear in any count, any report or any export. Somebody here reads it and decides.
- Accept creates the person and a case, and puts what they wrote on the case as its first note, in their own words. If they are already on file you attach it to the existing record instead of creating a second one.
- Decline keeps the request and your reason. Nothing is sent to the person automatically; declining is a record for you, not a message to them. That record is the part your organization has to be able to answer for later, which is why declining is not the same as deleting.
- Delete is an owner or admin decision and erases the request outright, the person's words with it.
The form asks for a name, what they need, and one way to reach them. Everything else is optional, because a form that demands an address from somebody who does not have one is a form that stops the people who most need it. It carries the same line about medical details that the rest of the app does.
You are emailed when a request arrives, so a queue nobody opens does not become a week of silence.
What must not go in it
All In One Nonprofit is not a HIPAA business associate and does not sign business associate agreements. Do not enter protected health information here: no diagnoses, no treatment records, no clinical notes, no medication lists. This holds even though the app has a place to type a note, and it holds even if your organization is otherwise careful, because the obligation is ours as well as yours and we have not taken it on.
What belongs in a note is what your organization did and what the person needs from you. "Referred to the county clinic and confirmed the appointment" is fine. The contents of that appointment is not.
The same line appears on the screens where you type, not only here, because a policy page nobody opens is not a control. Our privacy policy is at https://www.allinonenonprofit.com/privacy.html and our data retention page at https://www.allinonenonprofit.com/data-retention.html.
The word for the people you serve
Not every organization says "clients". A school program says students. A membership organization says members. A family services agency often says families. Open Case Management Settings and pick the word that fits, from Clients, Participants, Members, Students or Families. The sidebar, the headings and the labels all change to match.
Only the words you read change. Your saved records, the column names underneath and the CSV export keep their standard names, so a report you built last year still lines up with one you build today. That is the same rule the rest of the platform follows for organization vocabulary.
The same screen holds four lists worth filling in early: your programs, your funders, the services you deliver, and the units you count them in. They fill the dropdowns everywhere else, and they are what makes the Service Log filter the way a grant report asks.
The dashboard
The screen the app opens on, and it is built to answer one question: what needs attention today.
- Open cases and waiting on something, side by side, so a queue that is really a pile of things blocked on somebody else is visible as such.
- Active people, counting only records you have not set to inactive.
- Services logged this month, which is the honest early warning that logging has slipped.
- Open with no note in 30 days, in red when it is not zero. See cases that go quiet.
- Recently touched, the last handful of cases anyone changed, so you can pick up where the team left off.
Adding someone
Sidebar, Add a Client (or whatever word you chose). Only the name is required. Everything else is optional, including the email address.
Household size is worth filling in if you serve families, because most funders count people reached rather than records created, and a household of six is six people.
Set somebody to Inactive rather than deleting them when they move away or stop coming. Deleting removes the history; inactive keeps it out of your working list while leaving last year's numbers intact. The app will refuse to delete anybody who still has a case attached, for that reason.
Opening a case
Sidebar, Add a Case, or the "Open a new case" button on somebody's record.
A case is one piece of work with a beginning and an end. If somebody comes back next year for something different, open a second case rather than reopening the first. Two clean cases tell a truer story than one that ran for three years, and they count correctly.
| Field | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Short title | What this case is about, in a few words. "Eviction prevention", not "Housing". |
| Program | The stream of work it belongs to. Fill your list in Settings first and this becomes a pick list. |
| Status | Open means somebody is working it. Waiting on something means the next move is not yours. Closed means it ended. |
| Priority | Low, normal, high, urgent. Urgent and high show as a badge in the list, the rest stay quiet. |
| Assigned to | Who is responsible. A label, not a lock: it does not restrict who can read the case. |
| What they came for | The presenting need, in their words where you can. It is what a colleague picking this up cold needs first, and it is often not what the case turns out to be about. |
Case notes
Open a case and the note box is the first thing under the case details. Pick what kind of contact it was, check the date, and write.
Notes are a record of what happened, so they are not freely erasable. Whoever wrote a note can take it back within a day, which covers a genuine mistake. After that the correction is a new note saying what was wrong and what is right. That is what an auditor, a funder or a court would expect to see, and it is why the app works this way rather than letting anyone quietly rewrite the past.
The service log
Under the notes on every case there is a service log. Each entry is one thing you delivered: what it was, the date, how much, the unit you count it in, the program it sat under, and the funder paying for it.
Record it even when it feels obvious. "Case management, 1.5 hours" feels like it does not need writing down until the day somebody asks how many hours of case management your organization delivered last year, and the honest answer is that nobody knows.
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| What was provided | Your own list of services, set in Settings. Keep it short. Twelve services you use beats forty you do not. |
| How much and counted in | The number and its unit: 42 meals, 1.5 hours, 6 nights, 180 dollars. Pick the unit your funders ask for, not the one that is easiest to count. |
| Program | Fills itself from the case, and you can change it for a one-off. |
| Funder | Optional, and the single highest-value field in the app. Tagging services with the funder paying for them is what turns this log into a grant report you can hand over without rebuilding it. |
Building a grant report
Sidebar, Service Log. Set the dates the report covers, pick the funder, and press Show. You get the number of service records, the number of people served, totals by service, totals by program, and every underlying row.
Export as CSV gives you the rows as a spreadsheet, ready to paste into a report or attach to it. The export uses the standard column names rather than your chosen vocabulary, so a funder reading it needs no explanation of your house language.
A working pattern for the end of a grant year:
- Filter to the funder and the grant period.
- Read the people served figure. That is your unduplicated count of people who received something under that filter.
- Read the totals by service. That is your outputs table, already added up.
- Export the CSV and keep it with the report as your evidence file.
Cases that go quiet
The dashboard counts open cases with no note in the last thirty days, and the Cases list badges them. That is usually the case nobody picked back up rather than a case that is going well. Work down from the oldest note.
Closing a case
Open the case and press Close this case. You will be asked in a few words how it ended: housing secured, moved out of area, no further contact, referred elsewhere. The closing date is set for you.
Closing is not deleting. Everything stays: the notes, the services, the totals. A closed case still counts in last year's report, which is exactly what you want.
How it meets Contact Manager
Contact Manager holds everyone your organization works with in one list, and it shows a quiet indicator when somebody has an open case, linking across to it. It never shows a note, a case title or a program, and the indicator itself is only visible to people who already have access to Case Management. Somebody who cannot open a case cannot learn from Contact Manager that one exists.
Your first session
- Open Case Management Settings. Pick your word for the people you serve. Type your programs, your funders, the services you deliver, and the units you count them in.
- Add three people you are working with right now, from memory. Do not import anything yet.
- Open a case for each one, with a real title and a real presenting need.
- Write one note per case covering the last thing that happened.
- Log one service per case, with a funder attached.
- Open the Service Log and export the CSV, so you have seen what a funder would see.
- Decide whether a caseworker should see every case or only their own, on the same Settings screen. Leaving it as it is means everyone admitted sees everything, which suits most organizations of two or three staff.
- If you want people to be able to reach you without calling, turn the public link on, write two sentences about who you serve, and send the link to yourself first so you see what they see.
That takes about twenty minutes and it is the only reliable way to find out whether your service list and your units are the right ones before you have five hundred records built on the wrong shape.
What is not in this version
Said plainly, so nobody plans around something that is not here yet.
- No case-level file uploads. Case files go in the Document Library, so there is one place to find a document and one set of retention rules covering it.
- No AI drafting. Deliberate. The other apps draft donor letters and grant narratives; drafting somebody's case note from other case notes is not a feature we are willing to ship without a great deal more thought.
Getting help
Support is at https://www.allinonenonprofit.com/support/?app=Case%20Management. If you are weighing this app against a dedicated case management system, tell us what your funders ask you to report and we will tell you honestly whether this covers it.