Help with Foster Companion

Everything you enter — profiles, clothing inventory and purchases, medication schedules and logs, allowance records, and reports — is stored locally on your iPhone. There is no Foster Companion account, no cloud database, and no Foster Companion backup service.

A practical consequence: your records are only on that device. If the phone is lost, reset, or replaced, the records go with it unless they are in your own device backup. We cannot recover them, because we never have them.

Because the data lives on your device, it may be included in your normal iPhone backup, depending on your device and backup settings. Foster Companion does not run its own backup service and does not control the retention of any backup copy.

If backups matter to you, check your device's backup settings and confirm backups are actually completing. If you would rather Foster Companion data not be backed up off the device, review those same settings.

Transferring records depends entirely on your device's own transfer and restore process, since there is no account to sign in to on a new phone. Before you retire a device, make sure your backup or device-to-device transfer has finished and that the app's records appear on the new phone.

If a month's reports are important to keep outside the app, email them to yourself before switching devices.

The flow is deliberately manual, so nothing goes out by surprise:

1. Batch the month's records into a report.
2. Review the report contents for accuracy and completeness.
3. Enter or confirm the recipients you want it to go to.
4. Send. The app then marks the report's submission status.

Double-check recipient addresses before sending — report contents can be sensitive, and a sent email cannot be recalled. Once you send, delivery and retention are handled by your email provider and the recipients, outside our control.

If you change underlying records after a report has been sent, the app flags that report for resubmission so the discrepancy does not get lost. Review the updated report and send it again to the same recipients, noting in your message that it replaces the earlier version.

Reminders are set per medication and per scheduled time, and you mark a dose 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 requires.

If reminders are not appearing, check that notifications are allowed for the app in your device settings, that Focus or Do Not Disturb is not silencing them, and that the schedule times are correct. Treat reminders as an aid, not a safety system: always follow the prescribing physician's directions, the pharmacy label, and your agency's medication policies.

Clothing purchases are logged by month against an age-bracket allotment, with support for amounts that accrue when they are not spent. If a total looks wrong, check the child's age bracket, the dates on each purchase, and whether an item was logged in the intended month.

Allotment amounts and rules come from your county or agency. Confirm the figures you set up against the guidance you were given.

Allowance can be logged as it is paid, including acknowledging payments that happen automatically, so a month reconciles without reconstructing it later. If a month looks short, check for unacknowledged automatic payments and for entries recorded under the wrong date.

You control every copy on the device:

1. Delete individual records — a purchase, a dose, an allowance entry — in the app.
2. Delete a child's profile to remove the records kept under it.
3. Uninstall the app from your iPhone to remove its local data from the device.
4. Then consider your backups: copies may remain in your device backups until those backups expire or you remove them, according to your backup settings and provider.

There are no user accounts in the app, so there is no account to delete and no account-deletion request to make. Emails you have already sent stay with your email provider and their recipients; deleting a record in the app does not recall a sent message. Full detail is in the privacy policy.

Not yet — App Store availability is coming soon, and the app is being shared first with a small circle of foster families in San Diego County, California. There is no download link to offer today. The app is free, with no subscriptions or in-app purchases.

Feature requests from caregivers shape what gets built next, especially when a form or a county requirement does not fit the app's current structure. Describe the paperwork you are trying to satisfy and what would make it easier, without including a real child's information.