You’ve bootstrapped your child care business for quite some time now, allowing you to have full control over your business. But, as some tasks become too hard or time-consuming to manage, implementing some software can save you time, energy and peace of mind while you operate your child care center.
If you’ve been thinking about using a child care management software for your business, here’s everything you need to know before taking the plunge!
Benefits of Using Child Care Management Software
As a business owner, your time is the most valuable resource that you have. Child care management software is designed to streamline many of the administrative tasks that are necessary to run your business correctly and smoothly. As a result, businesses that have incorporated a child care management system into their day-to-day operations have seen incredible improvements, including:
- Saving time, effort and money
- Ability to spend more time with the children and your team
- Ease in running and managing your business
- Peace of mind with improved accuracy and automation
For many child care providers, administrative tasks that are done manually seem like a non-negotiable and don’t consider that there might be an easier way to do things. Taking the time to make the shift to a child care management system automates and organizes much of what you do, from tracking attendance to tracking payments and more.
Essential Features Of Child Care Management Software
To keep up with the complexity of running a child care business, it’s important to have easy-to-use and highly functional child care management software. But what should you look for when deciding on a software?
Child Care
As a child care provider, your number one priority and passion is providing a place where children can play and learn new skills in their early years - managing the rest of your business is just the backend. Child care software as a whole should make your life easier when it comes to administration and compliance so that you can spend more time focused on providing quality affordable child care to your community.
Record Keeping
A child care management system’s main functions should include an easy and intuitive way to keep a record of all your child, parent and staff information. This not only provides you with all the information you could need right at your fingertips but improves organization as a foundation for all your necessary activities.
Track Attendance
Using the organizational tools within the software to create classes or groups of child information, you are able to track attendance with just a few clicks, saving you time in tracking attendance in the traditional way.
Licensing Compliance
Ever feel stressed and confused about ensuring that your child care business is compliant? A child care management system should help you in this regard too! With the help of file management and easy links to licensing information for your area, you can easily ensure that your child care business is compliant where it matters most.
Enrollment Management
Part of record-keeping functions includes adding a new child or student to your program. A child care management system easily prompts you to add all the relevant information when adding a new child to your system, making the rest of your functions seamless, such as payment tracking and attendance.
Tuition Invoicing
Within the same function as the tuition invoicing, you will also be able to see a payment tracking feature. This helps you to save time backtracking and following up with families for payments.
Payment Tracking
Using the organizational tools within the software to create classes or groups of child information, you are able to track attendance with just a few clicks, saving you time in tracking attendance in the traditional way.
Customer Support
Adopting new technology can be a little daunting, but child care software is meant to make your life easier, not harder. A child care management system should have customer support available to you every step of the way, whether you're just setting it up or it’s enrollment crunch-time.
How to Evaluate & Pick Your Next Child Care Management System
Determine Your Needs
This includes looking critically at the way that your business functions and where you spend most of your time. If the majority of your time is spent doing administrative work, sorting through papers and simply managing your business, it’s time to find a child care software that will take some of those tasks off your hands and streamline them. Spend 20 minutes each day marking down and recording attendance? Time adds up. Spend a day every month sending out invoices and chasing down payments? Take note of that too. These are all things that can easily be streamlined or automated.
Weigh Your Options
Among all the child care software out there, search for ones that offer the features that you need most. Once you’ve chosen a few that you think could be a good option for you, be sure to test out the features, their customer support availability, pricing and, of course, user reviews. This will help paint a picture of how each software will support your business and give you more clarity in determining which option is right for you.
P.S. Don’t hesitate to reach out to the team to learn more about the software and help them work through your business’s specific problems through the lens of their software. Our team at Early Learning Ventures would be happy to walk you through our software in this way. Just schedule a demo.
Pick Software for Now and for the Future
Finally, choose a software that has the capabilities that you need now, with some functions that you can start to utilize more and more as your childcare business grows. This may include licensing compliance and tracking attendance, to begin with, but down the road easy invoicing and payment follow-ups may be necessary when you have more families to work with.
Are you looking for more child care management information? Check out our Ultimate Guide to Child Care Management.
Our child care management system makes running your child care program simple and efficient. Get back to what's most important. You shouldn't have to spend more time on the administrative tasks than you do with children and staff.
Get the latest and greatest child care news and information today! Sign up for our newsletter...
Or schedule a demo with us to learn more about how our child care management system, Alliance Core, can streamline your administrative processes.
Do you run an early childhood association made up of child care providers? If so, check out our Ultimate Guide to Shared Service Alliance.
Header image courtesy of Stockunlimited.
