Nothing impacts a business more than the attitude of its employees. Your staff is your connection to your customers; if they aren’t happy, customers will notice and may avoid dealing with you. Therefore, a happy staff is a productive staff that supports the growth of your childcare business.
Childcare management software provides multiple benefits, not only for your clients and business processes but for your staff as well. Working with inefficient processes and difficult communication can wear down even the most devoted teacher or administrator. Using childcare software that meets business needs often helps your employees and staff as well.
The Parent Portal
Recognizing staff accomplishments in a client forum keeps teachers and administrators engaged in the business. When employees are excited to come to work, it shows. Clients prefer companies that show they care for their employees.
Create a monthly email about teacher activities around the facility or in the classroom. Elect a teacher of the month. Every time someone is recognized for good work, it encourages that person and others to continue performing well. Retain your best workers by letting them know they are valued.
Online Registration
Printing, mailing, receiving, entering, and filing paper registration forms are repetitive tasks that take up valuable staff time and facility space. Your front desk admins will appreciate online registration because it frees them from such busywork and cuts down on data entry errors.
Parents fill out all the information on a computer, tablet, or smartphone and attach all documentation. No more printing, filing, or data entry needed.
The staff may also appreciate saving a few trees.
Billing and Invoicing
Next to manual registration, nothing is filled with more errors and paperwork than billing and invoicing. Printing invoices to place them in each child’s folder is another busywork task. Also, keeping track of added fees such as late pick-up and late payment penalties takes time and attention. Sometimes these penalties fall through the cracks, and you don’t get paid the late fees at all.
Automated billing and invoicing, especially when paired with online registration and automatic attendance tracking, make it easy for staff to monitor accounts and for your facility to receive all due payments. Automation also accounts for all late fees.
Calendar-Based Enrollment
Calendar-based enrollment gives your teachers information about the number of students enrolled in the activity or period ahead of time. Teachers have more time to plan, obtain resources for the activity, and make the possible decision to cancel if there's a lack of interest. If a different classroom is needed, they have time to make changes in facility usage.
The business profits as well because you know how much of your budget you can spend for the class or enrollment period beforehand.
Payment Processing
Once the bills go out, the checks start coming in. This means an employee must receive the checks, enter the payment into your system, and take the checks to the bank. Then you must wait until the check clears before the money is placed into your business account.
Automated payment processing allows parents to pay online with electronic checks, credit or debit cards, or bank draft and electronic fund transfer. Nobody needs to handle checks, perform data entry, or make a trip to the bank. No checks fall through the cracks, no data entry occurs, and payment is almost immediately put into the business account, streamlining your revenue.
If you have children receiving subsidies, childcare software automatically credits the correct accounts and prorates bills accordingly, satisfying your bookkeeping and accounting staff.
Site Access
Legacy systems that only allow staff to access electronic files from a single terminal or facility drag down productivity. They can also lead to issues with incomplete client files.
A cloud-based childcare management software solution allows you and your employees to access the records 24 hours a day, seven days a week from any device. If your teachers need to check schedules the evening before work, they can pull up anything they need from their own computer, tablet, or smartphone.
Attendance Tracking
Teachers and administrators don’t look forward to the chaos that is drop-off and pick-up time. If you are using paper rosters, parents crowd around looking for their child’s form or awaiting their turn at the signup sheet.
Then your admins must review each roster for completion and remember to ask parents to write correct dates and times.
Automated attendance tracking, coupled with bar-codes or smart cards, eliminates all that paper and crowding. Using an iPad interface or other device, children are checked in and out quickly, giving everyone more time for classroom activities with calmer kids.
Account Management
Who wouldn’t want to manage a client account with a few keystrokes instead of digging out paper files? Childcare solutions provide the ability to make changes to, suspend, and cancel accounts, in some cases automatically, as set by system parameters.
Digital account management also eliminates errors, and the centralized database ensures all applications are using the same information. Admins do not need to enter the same data multiple times into multiple applications.
Communication Tools
Teachers and parents both love to engage. Take away the obstacles keeping them from fully interacting about a child's experience. Online communication tools allow teachers to post pictures and video for parents to view, create emails to ask questions and send texts for emergency purposes.
One of the biggest fears of parents and childcare staff is that they won’t be able to communicate about an emergency situation quickly or accurately. Electronic communication systems remove that fear.
Staff Attendance
Clocking in and out on cards means staff must remember to use the time clock and payroll employees must handle data entry and calculations for correct payment. Automated staff attendance provides a completed record of each employee’s time and accurately calculates wages, taxes, and other payroll activities.
Teachers are assured of a correct paycheck, and accounting staff no longer need to handle time cards or manually calculate wages.
Meal Tracking
Kitchen and lunchroom employees have the difficult job of making sure the children are served healthy meals and snacks, as well as determining if said food is going to waste. Parents want to know if their children eat the right food or eat at all.
Food budgeting and meal planning are streamlined when you automate meal tracking. Special diets and menus are easily integrated into the general meal plans, and the grocery budget and food choices are guided by real-time information directly from the kids themselves.
Childcare software reduces the need for highly trained teachers and administrators to spend their time shuffling papers. It enhances productivity by helping your staff monitor attendance, meals, and enrollment quickly and accurately.
Provide your employees with a quality childcare solution and watch your productivity, enrollment, and satisfaction numbers soar.
