Daycare Software

You've made a smart decision to purchase daycare software. Whether you are a home daycare provider or operate a daycare center, a good daycare software will:

• Organize your child care business making it run more smoothly and trouble-free
• Save you time by automating time-consuming administrative tasks such attendance tracking and billing
• Save you money by reducing administrative costs
• Reduce stress with automatically generated schedules, child data sheets, and event reminders
• Make you money by allowing you to focus on growing your business
• Help you avoid legal and tax problems
• And, if you have employees, automatically keep track of hours and pay.

Be sure to take a look at the side-by-side comparison of some of the major daycare software packages.

5 easy steps to assessing your daycare's business needs and matching them with a daycare software

The purpose of daycare software is to simplify and automate daily administrative tasks that can be tedious and time-consuming. 5 simple steps can help you assess your daycare business needs and match them with a daycare software program.

1) Define your needs and goals.

The most important step in selecting daycare software is to determine your ultimate administrative needs. Your major goal may be to improve financial performance, manage receivables, and significantly increase the timeliness of payments. On the other hand, your major goal may be to reduce paperwork, decrease administration busywork, and manage clients and family information.
Some common administrative needs are:

• Manage client records
• Bill clients and automatically process tuition payments with credit cards or bank account information
• Keep track of the tuition, expenses, and payroll hours
• Creating essential reports such as tuition reports, attendance reports, year-end tax information for parents, teacher schedules, and attendance.
• Manage statistics  and generate reports necessary for grant writing
• Manage supplies and inventory
• Keep track of and stay compliant with USDA Food Programs
• Keep precise records of check-in and check-out times for both children and employees

Make a list of your business' priorities and seek a software program that best meets those needs.

2) Assess your need for integration, flexibility, and versatility.

Assess your daycare's business needs to determine the value you place on adaptability. Quality software should allow you to consolidate, import, or export data using popular applications like Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook and QuickBooks. If you have a unique business, you should make sure that forms within the software are fully customizable and adaptable. It should allow you to use your own unique forms and control each field within the forms.  Also if your daycare business has special programs like summer programs, hospital childcare programs, or seasonal schedules, see that the software is versatile enough to accommodate your needs.

3) Determine your software budget

An important consideration in selecting childcare software is price. The best daycare software will grow with your business, allowing you to add or subtract modules as necessary. Why pay more for features that you don't need? Try to find software that offers the most bang for your buck. And don't just reach for the cheapest software because many times you will end up wasting your money on software that does not suit your daycare's needs.

4) Evaluate software

Once you have found a software program or two that you believe will suit your business needs, spend some time evaluating the software. Many daycare software companies offer free trials so that you can determine if the software fills your specific needs. Take 30 days (or the length of the trial period, if less) to see if the software is user friendly and actually does help your daycare business run more efficiently.

5) Evaluate customer service

Good customer service is critical to any childcare software system. There are many forms of customer service and you will have to decide what type is best for you whether it is live training, virtual classes, remote support, e-tips, online resources, manuals, push content, or customer forums. Outstanding customer service is important in order to get the most out of your software.