Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, stress levels among care workers heightened despite the increased recognition of their essential and meaningful role. Especially in eldercare, strict measures were enforced to minimize contact between care workers and elderly clients in the event of even mild symptoms or recent COVID-19 exposure among care workers. As a consequence, there were frequent and sudden changes in home care working shifts due to the abundance of sick leaves. This pressure to realign working shifts prompted the swift adoption of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions within home care organizations. Yet, the implementation of managerial technology encounters inherent challenges in optimizing care, a point underscored by Mol (2008), whose conceptualization of the logic of care elucidated the flexible nature of care in practice. How did this inherent tension within care work impact both caregivers and recipients? To what extent does care work diverge from the frameworks outlined by managerial ideologies? The pandemic presents a unique opportunity to explore these questions, given the unprecedented strain on care workers. Therefore, this paper examines home care practices and ERP utilization in a rural/suburban municipality in southwestern Finland during the COVID-19 crisis. While digital technologies have facilitated organized home care visits, care workers have occasionally found it necessary to deviate from prescribed plans, thereby exposing a conflict between providing good care and achieving effective job performance. Through ethnographic descriptions of these occurrences within daily home care routines during the pandemic, this paper elucidates the challenges of delivering good care under digitally optimized working conditions and interprets the inconveniences experienced by elderly customers. Additionally, it assesses the potential of ERPs in achieving the objective of providing effective care.