How to Reduce Time Spent on Daycare Operations

Efficient daily operations at your daycare reduce the amount of time you spend on administrative tasks, allowing you and your staff more time to work with the children and plan for future business growth. Every minute shaved off the check-in process or creating a staff schedule is a minute you can spend on your next marketing plan or open house.

Childcare management software automates a variety of repetitive tasks to relieve staff of tedious paperwork while eliminating data entry errors and paper waste.

Registration and enrollment

Are you asking parents to come to your facility to pick up a packet of documents to fill out and drop off? Once the packet is complete and arrives at your front desk, what happens then?

• Information is entered into one or more systems for billing.
• Contracts and other forms are filed in various places.
• New documents such as sign-in sheets are created.
• Checks are listed on a deposit slip and taken to the bank for processing.

If errors are found, parents must return to your facility to correct them. Once everything is complete, you provide a handbook to parents along with more documentation.

How much paper and time (yours and the parents) did this take?

A childcare management solution automates these processes.

• Parents access a secure portal to fill out online forms designed to simplify data entry and reduce duplicate work.
• The information is stored in a central database to be accessed by other applications of the software at need.
• New attendees are automatically added to check-in rosters.
• Parents pay online with a credit card or bank draft. If they do write a check, you can process it as an e-check without leaving your office.

Registration and enrollment are no longer about moving mountains of paper from one place to another, hoping nothing gets lost and that any data entry performed is entirely accurate. Everything is completed in the shortest time possible and eliminates duplicate work.

Drop-off and pick-up

Sign in at the beginning of the day is often a morass of parents, staff, and children. Parents are in a hurry to get to work. Some of the children cling while others are fountains of energy. Your staff is pulled in a dozen directions to take care of small emergencies and reproduce forms.

Many childcare facilities continue to use printed rosters. Some daycares and preschools place all the attendees' names on a single document for the day or week. Others provide a binder for each child, which parents must find and fill out.

Either way, parents are milling around the check-in area looking for the sign-in sheet or binder, waiting for a new copy of a document, and waiting to hand off their children so they can leave. When it comes time to pick the children up, it happens all over again, plus you must track parents who pick up their charges after normal hours so you can add late fees to their bills.

With childcare management software, you can tame the lines and crowds with quick and efficient sign in and out. The parents may not even need to leave their cars.

• Use smartphones or tablets to sign children in at the curbside.
• Adopt biometric devices and badge scanners to shave off more time at drop-off.
• Automatically charge penalties for late arrivals at pick-up time.

Drop-off and pick-up occur more quickly than before. Parents are on their way to work, and the children are taken into their classrooms in record time. You may still see a few cases of separation anxiety, but you will have more energy to attend to them while the parent can quickly move out of sight.

Also, by keeping accurate attendance records at your daycare, you can maintain audit readiness and licensing easier than with hard copy documents.

Staff scheduling

Calculating the required student-teacher ratios and full-time equivalents (FTEs) with limited or inaccurate data can take up a considerable chunk of time. If your facility cares for children ranging in age from infancy to preschool, you must consider different ratios for separate age groups. Activity scheduling for each group is another challenge.

If you schedule too many teachers, your classrooms will be overstaffed. Tuition will not cover wages. If you schedule too few, you risk the children's safety and your license.

Childcare management software simplifies staff and activity scheduling as well as allows you to offer calendar-based enrollment with less effort. Also, you can monitor daily operations in real-time to uncover inefficiencies and track resource use.

Planning and scheduling multiple activities, calculating FTEs, and maintaining the proper staffing levels are a breeze with childcare management solutions. An Excel spreadsheet can’t compete.

Billing and payment processing

As we mentioned earlier in this post, automated billing and payment processing are time-savers for many reasons.

• Billing software accesses drop-off and pick-up information directly from a central database.
• Automated pick-up time monitoring allows the system to add late fees as they occur.
• Late payment notices and fees are added automatically.
• Invoices are sent electronically or batch printed as needed each week or month.
• Parents can pay online with a credit card, set up a bank draft or electronic funds transfer, or pay at the facility with a check that you process immediately as an e-check.
• Payments are automatically processed with funds deposited into one or more accounts as needed.
• The payment cycle is streamlined; funds arrive in your accounts more quickly than with traditional check processing.

At tax time, you have all your financial information ready for your accountant, plus you can provide tax statements to parents through a secure portal.

Automating the registration, check-in, scheduling, billing, and payment processing eliminates data entry and its associated errors, streamlines your payment cycle and eases scheduling for staff and activities. The data is available at all times so you can pull reports, track resource use, and monitor daily operations in real-time.

Childcare management software eliminates repetitive and tedious paperwork that takes up time and energy better spent on your clients and business. Automated data and payment processes simplify licensing audits and payment subsidy acquisition while increasing client satisfaction.

If you want to see how childcare management solutions can benefit your business, visit EZChildTrack for more information.