Before understanding the reasons you need it, perhaps it might be advantageous for you to have a solid explanation of what child care management software is.
Child Care Management Software: A digital platform designed to help you manage your business more efficiently, child care management software enables you to automate administrative tasks, streamline communication and improve monitoring.
Find out the reasons why it is wise to consider this software with these seven questions.
1. How can child care management software help you as an owner and/or manager?
Child care management software helps you with enrollment, daily child monitoring, communication with parents, billing and reporting, staff management, and class scheduling, keeping you in control of your center’s operations. With a single dashboard, you have your finger on every detail for monitoring, tracking and controlling your business. By using this software, you’re leveraging automation and streamlined online processes to eliminate the inefficiencies that plague the manual processes that support child care management.
2. What other crucial benefits can an efficient child care management software provide?
Controlling and managing a child care center can be physically, emotionally and mentally exhausting. When you implement child care management software, exhaustion can be avoided by automating and streamlining processes that are more efficient when the human error of manual processes is eliminated. Child care management software delivers what you could consider as secondary benefits of:
- Enabling you to create an environment that promotes learning and development.
- Making it possible for child care centers to operate efficiently without being totally consuming for you or your staff.
- Reducing the potential for owners/managers to experience fatigue.
- Allowing you to keep tabs on your staff’s day-to-day activities even when you’re physically absent.
- Freeing child care staff to give more attention to the children.
- Giving parents peace of mind knowing how their children are faring through real-time updates.
- Being crucial for the success of the business.
3. How do you select a platform for managing your child care center?
Looking at the child care management software marketplace, you’ll see several options that provide you with a basic solution for operating your child care center. The question is, how do you take basic to extraordinary? Examine your choices carefully. Make sure you can choose features that align with your center’s needs and add features when your growth requires it.
What is provided with a basic solution?
- Enrollment tools
- Student attendance check-in and check-out
- Immunization records
- Real-time parental updates through photos, videos, and reports
- Payment processing
- Staff attendance management
- Online staff training
What does it take to make basic extraordinary?
- Skills tracking
- Operational store
- Allergy tracking
- Managing apparel/uniforms (sizing and purchasing)
- Parent portal
Selecting a management software that is aligned with the business you do and how you do it is critical in ensuring that you and your staff maintain sanity and inspire the children in your care.
What questions would help you make your child care management software choice?
4. Be sure you look closely at your needs as you consider child care management software.
Ask yourself questions to identify the areas of your business where change is critical.
For instance:
- What administrative tasks take most of your staff’s time?
- What tactical tasks consume your time and distract you from strategic activities?
- What long-term and short-term goals can your child care management software support?
- There’s no doubt that you have more questions you can ask…
Using your answers to these types of questions will guide you in selecting a child care management software that is your game changer. Afterall, you know from your peers who have already adopted child care management software that there is no way to effectively run your center without it.
5. What six areas are highly impacted by child care management software?
There are six critical processes that your child care center needs to operate. Getting on the path to improvement in these process areas can help you set your child care center apart from other child care choices in your area.
Dive into how you enroll students, track student attendance, communicate with parents, manage your staff, pull accurate reports, and do your billing to learn more about your critical operational processes.
Enrollment
Child care management software transforms enrollment into a smooth process that is quick and easy for busy families.
Make sure your choice:
- Enables you to customize online forms, lists and schedules.
- Makes classes visible online.
- Provides an option for online enrollment.
- Sends alerts for online enrollment.
Attendance Tracking
World events proved to us that contactless attendance is essential. Ridding your office of paper attendance forms means that you have less contact, more security and more accuracy in attendance procedures.
Make sure your choice:
- Enables contactless attendance.
- Gives you tracking options for absences and illness reporting.
- Provides health screening options.
Parent Communication
Your child care center’s family satisfaction tells you how successful you’ve been in building a bridge between your center and their home.
A child care management software that exceeds expectations is one that helps you build this bridge – giving you an open line of communication and giving parents a high comfort level in leaving their children in your care.
Make sure your choice:
- Empowers communication through a parent app from management to home and from teacher/classroom to home.
- Enables sharing of photos or updates through a parent portal news feed.
- Offers extras like newsletters, snack calendars and curriculum updates.
Staff Management
Managing your staff consumes a tremendous amount of your time. The beauty of a child care management software is that it helps you take care of some of the most important facets of your business.
Make sure your choice:
- Tracks staff requirements.
- Tracks staff hours.
- Simplifies payroll.
- Organizes staff email and contact information.
Accurate Reporting
Paperwork is wrought with error. When you make the change to child care management software you’re leaving those errors behind! The fact that it increases accuracy in itself makes it worthwhile. When you add the convenience of pulling information from a central database – regardless of what task you’re doing – it is absolutely one of the best decisions an owner can make.
Make sure your choice:
- Offers billing reports.
- Organizes staff hours.
- Provides enrollment numbers.
- Provides class lists.
Billing
You, more than anyone else, know that your billing process is essential to your child care center’s viability. The faster you can turn around payment processing, the quicker the money goes into your bank account and is ready to be used. Regardless of the size of your organization, using manual processes for billing forces you to spend time that is better utilized operating and marketing your business. Child care management software introduces efficiency into your billing process using the same process improvements that:
- Simplify the way parents make monthly payments.
- Streamline the way you send out billing and collect funds.
You’ll wonder how you’ve managed for so long with it!
Make sure your choice:
- Automates billing.
- Provides paperless invoices.
- Offers a parent app for easy access to billing information.
- Provides tax receipts and statements.
Without these four features, you’ll struggle to remove manual tasks and paper from your billing process.
6. Can you depend on security with child care management software?
There are important details of child care management software that ensure the security of your data and the data of your families.
SaaS solution. Being a SaaS means that the industry leading child care management software is not a piece of software loaded onto your office computer. It is a software service that allows you to leverage the pervasiveness of the Internet for utilizing your child care management data and features.
Hosted solution. Being a hosted solution means that you don’t have to worry about or pay for costly IT staff, services or software for storing and protecting your data or that of your families. Your software takes on that burden for you. You and your families simply go to a browser anytime necessary for all tasks related to your child care center.
Risk-free. System availability is important and that’s why the best in the child care management software business guarantees 99.9% system uptime. The technical details are that redundancy, 24/7 monitoring and fault-tolerant engineering are in place to handle your critical business software needs every hour of every day of every year. Guaranteed.
Safe enough for banks. Think about it: your data is your most important asset and your child care center relies on it. Child care management software has the infrastructure and features to make sure that your data is secure and always recoverable. Critical financial and communications services trust the same data centers as the marketing leading child care management solution.
7. Why is cloud-based software the wisest choice for your child care center?
Cloud-based child care management software delivers to you several advantages that software installed on your computer can’t.
You benefit from:
- Accessing your records anytime and anywhere you have an Internet connection.
- Administering your financial interests anytime you’d like.
- Working remotely, whether that be from your home or another location outside of your office.
- Using your mobile device to form office tasks, just as if you’re in you’re there.
- Having your finger on the pulse of your business without spending day and night at your office.
- Working on your business instead of constantly working in the minutia of your business.
With the benefits of child care management software, you can take your business to a new level of excellence, unlock growth potential and release yourself from your own daily grind.
Final Thoughts
I think you’ve established that you just don’t have enough time to do everything you need to do – much less add those things you’d like to do. Child care management software is perhaps the best way to change this dynamic. Through the automation of the time-consuming components of your business, you actually have time for the strategic, future-focused areas that your business has been missing.
