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A childcare facility that has not yet adopted an appropriately designed management software will inevitably feel its absence. Don’t learn this lesson the hard way, because it is 2022 and the importance of adopting the necessary business tools for any business cannot be overstated.
With that being said, not every nursery or childcare management software available is worth your money or time, and even some of the good ones might not be cost-effective for a small establishment. Keeping all that in mind, here’s a brief introduction to the most important features that are to be expected from a new childcare management system.
Cost-Effectiveness
To judge a childcare management system’s cost-effectiveness to your business, here’s a small questionnaire for reference:
- Do they have plans that fit the budget?
- Are their plans scalable?
- Does the software have features that your childcare system needs?
- Are they able to deliver the necessary features within a plan that you can afford?
- Is the plan within your budget equipped with features that the nursery can make use of?
- Is one or more features included in the package worth expanding your budget?
By the time you have scrutinised the top childcare management system providers and their plans with these questions, the final list will be much shorter and easier to sort through.
Features to Expect: The Most Important Ones
Some childcare management systems will inevitably have a longer set of features than others, but do they have the most important ones you need to run the business? Since we are discussing a specific segment here, it isn’t difficult to identify the most relevant features that you should expect from your nursery management software.
Accessibility
Childcare is not a technical job, so the ones accessing and using it daily should find the UI user-friendly. A simple user interface encourages employees to use the system more readily and it saves time. The more user-friendly a central management software’s interface is, the less time your staff will have to spend on it.
Communication
The ideal childcare management software should have in-built features for the staff to communicate amongst themselves, as well as the parents in real-time. This is one of the many reasons why Nursery Story is so widely used by childcare facilities. While most management systems in the niche usually have staff-staff and staff-parent communication features, Nursery Story integrates real-time feeds to initiate parent-children communication.
It is an extremely nifty feature to have at your disposal since parents and children often miss each other when they are not in physical proximity. With real-time feeds capturing every precious and anxious moments of their children’s time at the establishment, that should no longer be an issue.
Automation
There should be options to automate mundane paperwork, data-entry work, compliance checks, etc. It saves numerous hours every week which gives the staff more time to interact with the children and lets you save money by not having to pay as much for overtime every year.
Although accounting & tax calculation features are not exactly something that can be expected from a childcare management software, you can expect the system to at least keep all financial documents in perfect order. It makes accounting and tax calculations much easier.
