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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 person in that family, over an authorized date range. A family can have more than one referral at a time, and the referral is what your documentation and billing attach to.

Family  ──contains──▶  Members
   │                      │
   │                      └── one of them is the referral's recipient
   │
   └──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.

A referral serves a person, not a household​

This is the part worth being explicit about: a referral is a service delivered to a person. The family is where that person is filed — it isn't who the service is for.

One household can carry several referrals at the same time, each for a different person, each with a different assigned staff member. A father in Home-Based Casework and a child in Family Preservation are two separate cases that happen to share a household record.

So each referral names the person it's for — its primary recipient — and that name is what FCR shows you: on tasks, on lists, in document headers, on notifications, on your timesheet, and in approval queues. A family's display name ("Thunderman Family") is a filing convenience, and the people in a household frequently don't share it. Telling a staff member their client is a family name that isn't their client's name is wrong in front of a DCS family, so FCR doesn't do it.

  • Everyone the referral covers stays covered. The recipient is one of the covered members, not a replacement for the list.
  • A referral with no recipient set shows the family name, just as before — a normal state for one that's still being built.
  • The name shown is the person's legal name, the one on the DCS referral document, not a preferred or informal name.

Practice managers, supervisors, and admins set and change it — see Creating a referral.

Who creates what​

  • Practice managers, supervisors, and admins create and edit families, members, and referrals, and assign staff members to cases.
  • Staff members (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.

What staff members see vs. what leadership sees

Staff members 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 staff member's screens.

Where to go next​

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