Caregivers and home care
When a parent lives alone in a buzzer building, the entrance becomes a daily problem for everybody: a support worker at nine, a nurse on Tuesdays, and an adult child across town fielding calls about a door they cannot see. Enterkey puts that entrance on a schedule and shares it with the whole family.
Who is actually standing at the panel
Home care runs on appointments. A personal support worker arrives at set hours, a nurse comes weekly, a physiotherapist comes fortnightly, and every one of them has the next client waiting. A missed press is not an inconvenience, it is a cancelled visit and a note in a file.
A parent with limited mobility may not reach the handset in time, and a parent who is resting will not hear it at all. A recurring schedule covering the visit hours takes the handset out of the equation for those hours and no others.
The family shares one door
One adult child sets Enterkey up for the parent's unit and sends the others an invite link. Everyone in the group receives the buzzer calls, can arm a key for an unexpected visit, and reads the same activity log, so the sibling who lives nearest is no longer the only person who can help.
One subscription covers the group at $9.99 a month or $69.99 a year, with a one-month free trial for new members. Adding a brother, a sister or a spouse costs nothing extra.
What stays the same for your parent
Outside the scheduled windows nothing changes at all. Buzzes forward to the phones on the account exactly as the building has always worked, so neighbours, friends and the grocery order still reach a person. The apartment buzzer guide sets out what the panel does in that ordinary case.
The activity log in the app shows a time and which key or schedule opened the entrance, and nothing else. It answers the question a family asks, which is whether the nine o'clock visit happened, without turning a parent's home into a monitored space.
How it works, step by step
Set it up for the parent's unit from anywhere
One family member creates the account for that address and asks the property manager to point the unit's directory entry at the Enterkey number. It is one change, made once.
Invite the rest of the family
Send the invite link from settings. Whoever joins gets the buzzer calls and full control, so a Tuesday problem does not wait for one person to notice their phone.
Put the care visits on a repeating window
Weekdays 9:00 to 9:45 for the morning support worker, Thursdays 13:00 to 14:00 for the nurse. The window is only as wide as the agency's actual hours.
Give the agency a code
Add a PIN to the schedule and pass it to the agency office. Staff can say it or type it, which matters when somebody is carrying equipment.
Watch the visits land in the log
Each entry carries a time and the key that opened the door. It confirms that the entrance opened under the agency's window at a given minute and nothing beyond that: it cannot say who came or what was done while they were there.
Frequently asked questions
Does my parent need a smartphone?
No. Enterkey lives on the family's phones, not theirs. The building's directory entry for the unit points at the Enterkey number, and everything after that happens between the panel and the app.
Nothing has to be installed in the apartment, and no hardware is added to any door.
Can my parent still answer the buzzer themselves at other hours?
Buzzes outside a scheduled window forward to the phones on the account. If your parent uses an iPhone and wants to keep answering their own door, they join the group and the calls reach them as before.
If they would rather not, the calls come to the family instead, which for many households is the reason they set this up.
What about an unexpected visit outside the schedule?
Arm a key from wherever you are standing. Durations run from five minutes to twelve hours, or permanent with a PIN, so a sibling driving over tonight, or a neighbour dropping off medication on a Sunday, never requires the schedule to be rewritten.
Emergency responders are a separate matter and do not depend on any of this: they use the building's own access arrangements, exactly as they did before. Because everyone in the group can arm keys, whichever family member is awake handles the ordinary case.
Does the agency have to install anything?
No. Support workers use the panel in the lobby, exactly as they do at every other address on their route. The app is for the household, and visiting staff never see it.
A parent's front entrance should not depend on who happens to be near a phone.