Understanding families, members & referrals
Three things sit at the center of every case in FCR. Once these click, the rest of the system follows.
The three building blocks
Family — the household your agency works with. It carries a display name, the DCS case number, the primary county, and the people who belong to it. Every clinical document eventually ties back to a family.
Members — the individual people in a family: parents, children, kinship caregivers, other household adults. Each member has their own identity and demographics.
Referral — the authorization from DCS to deliver a specific service to a specific family over an authorized date range. A family can have more than one referral over time, and the referral is what your documentation and billing attach to.
Family ──contains──▶ Members
│
└──has one or more──▶ Referrals ──▶ the work you document and bill
How they connect
You create a family first, add its members, and then create one or more referrals against it. A family stays in FCR across multiple referrals — when DCS sends new work for a family you already serve, you add a new referral rather than re-entering the household.
Who creates what
- Practice managers, supervisors, and admins create and edit families, members, and referrals, and assign workers to cases.
- Workers (service providers) see the families and referrals they're assigned to, and document their work there. They don't create families or referrals.
This mirrors how the roles work everywhere in FCR — see Your role in FCR.
Workers focus on the people and the work — services are shown by name (for example, "Home-Based Casework," "Court," "Face to Face"). The billing-side detail behind a referral (authorization numbers, codes, and rates) is reserved for practice managers and admins and never appears on a worker's screens.