Child care management software is a revolutionary tool for child care centers and professionals. These intuitive solutions empower your department to more efficiently manage business across child care programs, track detailed information on each participant and provide more flexible, stress-free experiences for families in your community.
To see whether child care management software is the right choice for your team, let’s dive deeper into its capabilities and impact:
What is Child Care Management Software?
Child care management software is a collection of technologies designed to support day-to-day operations for child care businesses, including:
- Child care centers
- Daycares
- After-school programs
- School districts
- Child activity centers
The purpose of child care management software is to streamline the internal operations of these programs, such as enrollment, attendance, billing and even facility communication. These tools combine a massive amount of information (from child profiles and employee scheduling to billing invoices) into a single easy-to-use database, bringing greater visibility and transparency across your operations.
This type of technology is especially beneficial for programs that demand frequent parent engagement, like daycares and activity centers. Daycare software allows for seamless communication between parents and staff, keeping them connected and engaged throughout the day with mobile messaging, alerts and updates.
From registration and enrollment to parent engagement and scheduling, child care management software is a natural fit for programs looking to work more efficiently, coordinate care and increase community participation.
Core Benefits of Child Care Management Software
Child care management and daycare software offer a variety of benefits for applicable programs and the families they serve, including:
Streamlined Registrations & Online Enrollment
One of the most time-consuming and stressful steps in child care is program enrollment. But with the right management software, you can make this process convenient, simple and accessible for all parties. These tools allow parents to register their kids in your programs at any time or place via online and in-person enrollment options.
With child care management software, you can offer individual and group registration, ask all the questions you need through fully customizable forms, electronically capture signatures and even set up coupon and discount codes. These features provide parents with more flexible enrollment and payment options, increasing participation and retention across your facilities.
Best of all, child care management software simplifies enrollment for your team, too. Use these tools to collect application fees and deposits straight through your online forms. That means less time spent tracking and recording payments—and more time actually engaging with families!
Integrated forms also automate the process of data entry for child and family records, saving you hours and reducing human error. You can rest easy knowing that all family data is accurately logged in your system.
Parent Engagement
Parent engagement is a crucial part of any successful child care program, especially with the growing popularity of mobile devices. Today’s parents need constant access to information and updates on their kids, whether they’re at work or on the move. Thankfully, the best child management and daycare software includes in-app tools to make parent engagement easy, professional and even fun!
Most child care management software offers basic messaging features, which let you share important events (like facility closures or updates) through online or in-app messages. Send program-wide notifications to every parent’s smart device with just a few clicks—or create a custom message for just one family or recipient in seconds. It’s a perfect way to safely and securely send sensitive files, like medical and immunization records.
But we also mentioned fun, right? Some software includes video and photo-sharing capabilities, too! This allows your staff to update parents on the activities their kids are doing in a seamless, personalized way. Delight families with a silly class photo to brighten up any workday—or keep parents feeling connected with a video message sent directly to their smartphone. The possibilities are endless.
Safety & Security
Safety and security are leading concerns for any parent. Families want to know that their child’s personal records are protected—as well as their financial information across child care and tuition payments. Safe, contactless drop-offs and pick-ups are an essential consideration as well. That’s why leading child care management software is equipped with top-of-the-line security and safety features.
Child care management and daycare software allow users to perform check-in/check-out functionality from mobile devices. This creates a versatile, secure and contact-free system parents can use to check their kids in and out on their own smartphones without ever entering the facility.
Likewise, this software improves security with on-hand emergency medical and pick-up information, as well as fully compliant payment processing systems. State-of-the-art data centers and app infrastructure keep all the sensitive data your programs collect safe from security breaches, back-up failures, software crashes and other events that could disrupt facility uptime.
Coordination & Scheduling
Child care management software makes it easy to monitor and manage staff scheduling and payroll using a single streamlined system. Some of these tools even include unique schedule templates that help minimize manual data entry and get your entire team on the same page.
You can use this software to plan out employee away time (like vacations) while maintaining any required child-to-staff ratios. These scheduling tools are a great way to coordinate operations between facilities—and gain better visibility into available resources and employees.
Support Your Communities with ACTIVE Network
At ACTIVE, we offer a comprehensive solution for child care management called ACTIVENet. This innovative recreation management software delivers a range of useful features designed to simplify daily activities for child care programs, including:
- Online & in-person registration options
- Auto-pay & flexible payment plans
- Calendars for program coordination
- Parent engagement & communication tools
Our software specialists have years of experience helping child care programs automate manual tasks, build stronger lines of communication with parents and enable friction-free enrollment, all while protecting and managing their data.
Contact ACTIVE to learn more about our leading software tools for child care management, and how you can put them to work for the families you serve. You can also reach out for additional resources to help you forge stronger communities and grow your programs over time.
