Kal SaadYou just finished a 12-hour emergency shift at a clinic 90 minutes from home. The day rate looked great on paper — $1,200 for the day. But by the time you drove three hours round trip, grabbed lunch on the road, and filled up the tank, you're not really sure what you earned.
Sound familiar?
The Spreadsheet That Started Everything
Like most relief vets, a friend of the co-founders of ReliefBooks started with a spreadsheet. One tab for shifts, one for mileage, one for expenses, and a prayer that everything would line up at tax time.
It didn't.
The spreadsheet couldn't tell the difference between where you worked (City Pet Clinic) and who actually paid you (Roo). It couldn't warn you that booking a morning shift in Philadelphia and an afternoon shift in Delaware meant a drive that was physically impossible. And it definitely couldn't tell you that 68% of your income was coming from a single agency — a red flag the IRS uses to reclassify contractors as employees.
The Triangle Problem
Relief work has a unique structure that no existing tool was built for. We call it The Triangle:
- You — the relief professional running a business
- The Clinic — where you physically show up and do the work
- The Agency — the platform (Roo, etc.) that books you and pays you
General accounting software sees one customer. But in relief work, the clinic and the payer are often different entities. Your invoice goes to the agency, but your mileage is calculated to the clinic. Your door codes and Wi-Fi passwords are at the clinic, but your rate negotiation happened with the agency.
This triangle creates chaos:
- Invoices go to the wrong place
- Mileage gets estimated instead of tracked per shift
- Expenses can't be attributed to specific work days
- Tax compliance becomes a guessing game
Why Existing Tools Fail
We tried everything:
General accounting tools are great for traditional businesses, but they don't understand shifts. They can't link a gas receipt to a specific Tuesday at a specific clinic. They can't calculate your effective hourly rate after deducting travel time and expenses.
Scheduling apps like Google Calendar handle dates and times, but they don't know about pay rates, travel distances, or the difference between a direct booking and an agency placement.
Mileage trackers track miles, but they can't connect those miles to the shift that caused them or flag when the drive makes a shift unprofitable.
Spreadsheets can do anything in theory, but in practice they break, they're never up to date, and they can't send an invoice or warn you about tax risks.
Every relief professional we talked to was stitching together 4-5 tools and still didn't have a clear picture of their business.