Parents spend a long time deciding what daycare to send their children to. They look for a place that is child centered. A place that is staffed by caring, loving and knowledgable adults. They want a place that keeps them up to date and does an excellent job of communicating.
Preschool and daycare providers also spend a long time planning their centers. They want to offer meaningful curriculum to older children and nurturing environments to infants. They want a staff that is trustworthy, honest, dependable, and caring. They want to have strong relationships with their parents, always keeping them up to date on school news, payment deadlines, special opportunities and staff changes.
The truth is most day care centers and preschool environments start with the best of intentions. Even the directors, who are responsible for the office duties and bookkeeping tasks, as well as filing state paperwork, intend to have a day that is at least partially filled with the real goal of all childcare–spending quality time with children.
The reality, however, is sometimes a different story. Overworked staff struggle to find time to keep up to date paperwork for parents. Directors spend more hours in their offices behind their computers instead of enjoying time working with children. And, worst of all, many parents feel like they are not receiving the most updated information and the best communication about their child’s day, even though they are paying a high price for their children’s care.
In fact, one of the most difficult parts of being a day care provider is the amount of work that needs to be done with a limited number of staff. Meeting state adult to child ratios and providing the best care is difficult enough, but add in the office management and things can become overwhelming fast. For many child care, and even after care programs, the solution is a reliable software for daycare centers that can help manage the paperwork, the documentation, and the constant communication that is necessary to help parents feel at ease.
The best software for daycare centers not only helps manage office tasks like payments and attendance, it also comes with a cloud-based mobile application that collects the payments, automates check-in and check-out procedures and streamlines communication. Most of the over 1 million daycare center, family childcare homes, and early childhood education programs in America lack technology infrastructure and tools for business intelligence.
While investing in computer software for daycare centers may seem costly at first, most childcare centers find that the program can quickly pay for itself. Daycare management software has a proven record for upgrading payment options for parents who have become accustomed to in other venues. Allowing revenue share and charge processing capture sends a message to your customers that you are willing to invest in technology that can streamline the bookkeeping process. The cost of the computer software for daycare is offset by labor savings and optimization of payment collections. Some centers save as much as 100 hours a week by automating the revenue cycle alone.
In addition to making the office work more efficiently, a child daycare management system can improve the communication with the parents of the 32.7 million American children who are in daycare arrangements. Providing real time updates about feeding, changing, and napping times is one more way that the most high end daycare centers can communicate with their parents. In addition, this information can be translated into data that can be used for state reporting systems. Especially for providers who receive state or federal subsidies, the best software management process can be a real time saver.
When averaged, Americans spend close to 8% of their monthly income on child care. These parents expect the best possible care for their dollar. If your daycare could reduce the amount of hours it takes to process payments, check in and check out times, and communications with state and federal agencies as well as with parents, those hours could instead be spent with the children.
Are you spending more hours a week processing paper work and payments than you want? Daycare computer software can help you get you away from the computer and back with the children.