For foster families
Foster Companion keeps the records a foster home has to keep — clothing, medication, allowance, monthly reports — in one place on your iPhone, so the end of the month stops being a scramble through receipts and notebook pages.
Built for iPhone. Records stay on your device — there is no Foster Companion account to create and no cloud database holding your children's information.
What it helps with
Most foster homes track the same handful of things every month, across paper forms, phone photos and memory. Foster Companion gives each of those a proper home, keeps the running totals for you, and turns the whole month into a report you can review before anyone else sees it.
Batch a month's records into a single report, read it over, then email it to the contacts you designate — a social worker, an agency inbox, your own records. Foster Companion tracks whether a report has been submitted, and flags it for resubmission if you edit the underlying records after sending.
You choose every recipient. Nothing leaves the app until you send it.
Keep a profile for each child in your home, with an optional nickname to use on the dashboard instead of a full name, and a photo if you want one. Everything else in the app hangs off the profile, so logs never get mixed up between children.
Record what a child actually has, what has been replaced, and what still needs buying. Monthly purchasing logs sit alongside the inventory, with support for age-bracket clothing allotments and accrual, so you can see what has been spent and what has carried forward.
Set up each medication with its dose and times, get reminders when a dose is due, and mark it complete once it has been given. At the end of the month the log can be closed out with the signature or initials your paperwork asks for.
Log allowance as it is paid, note savings or expenditures alongside it, and acknowledge automatic payments so the month reconciles without guesswork later.
It is an organizational and reporting tool for foster families: a better place to keep notes, totals and logs than a shoebox of receipts.
It is not a substitute for your agency's or county's instructions, for medical or legal advice, or for the official forms and recordkeeping any placement requires. Where your agency specifies a form, a due date, or a way of recording something, follow that.
Foster Companion started as a set of spreadsheets and phone reminders kept by a foster parent in San Diego County, California, and grew into an app because a phone is what's actually in your hand when a dose is due or a receipt appears.
It is being shared first with a small circle of local foster families, with wider availability planned. The app is free to use today, with no subscriptions or in-app purchases.
Questions, corrections, or a feature your paperwork needs? privacy@fostercompanion.com.
Foster Companion is not published yet. App Store availability is coming soon; there is no download link to share today, and no mailing list to join — email is the way to reach the app.