Effectively managing your childcare center is not an easy task. With the chaos that comes with being a childcare provider, it’s impossible to predict the unexpected challenges that will come up each day. Fortunately, there are systems and processes you can put in place to alleviate the stress of managing a center and help your school run more efficiently. By saving hours each week, the quality of your center will improve, your staff will be less likely to experience burnout, and child development will soar. Take a look at these five tips to increase efficiency at your childcare center in order to manage it more effectively.
1. Automate Billing and Invoicing
Managing billing cycles, sending invoices, and monitoring incoming payments and outstanding balances can take providers multiple hours each week. Billing through outdated, disparate procedures also increases the risk of human error. Having your billing automated and in one system for you and your families can ensure you recognize revenue accurately and on time. By using a software platform like Kangarootime, you can customize your billing cycles, automate invoices, and even report on important financial data. Most importantly, you’ll save time. In fact, we’ve heard from our customers that they’ve saved up to 24 hours each week on billing alone through automation.
2. Power Up Your Classrooms
Teachers have a range of responsibilities in their classroom but most importantly they need to provide quality care for the children. This can be hindered by filling out paper daily notes, manually tracking attendance, or spending too much time marking down activities or taking notes.. Providing your staff with classroom management tools can save them time and increase efficiency so they can focus more on the kids. These tools can help digitize daily notes, make messaging families and staff faster, simplify ratio monitoring, and automate attendance tracking.
3. Simplify Enrollment
Currently, many childcare providers are managing a waitlist and struggling to keep up with their enrollment process. Finding available spots, ensuring your center is properly staffed, and staying compliant are all challenges owners and directors face. Enrollment tools take away these challenges by offering age-up notifications, forecasting capabilities, waitlist management, and calculating FTE. Simplify your enrollment process by taking the spreadsheet out of the equation. Implement a software solution to help you optimize enrollment at your center by making registration a breeze for families and sending offers with the click of a button.
4. Digitize Family Engagement
Your relationship with families is one of the most important components of your center’s success. With everything else there is to manage at your school, prioritizing family engagement isn’t always possible. By using tools like Kangarootime, you can make connecting with families faster and easier. Sharing photos and videos, daily notes, messages, invoicing, and more can be done right in the classroom in a matter of seconds. These engagements are invaluable to parents, increasing trust in your center and staff.
5. Make Staff Management and Scheduling Easier
Now more than ever, creating a positive employment experience for staff is crucial in the ECE industry. However, coordinating schedules, time-off requests, and breaks can be a headache, especially with all of the other responsibilities owners and directors take on. Investing in a platform that has the capabilities to set schedules, monitor time logs, coordinate time off requests, and more while connecting your staff to their employee experience is invaluable for centers. Streamlining these processes not only takes the burden off of you and your staff but also saves time, increases productivity, and helps improve your center’s efficiency.
All of these steps can be accomplished by implementing one platform. Childcare management software can simplify your operations and help increase efficiency. Start managing your center more efficiently so you can focus on growth and child development by choosing a software like Kangarootime. To get started, learn more and or schedule some time to chat.
Kangarootime is the leading all-in-one childcare management software for daycares and preschools. With billing and invoicing capabilities, parent communication and staff management tools, and classroom automation, Kangarootime helps childcare centers grow and scale. To learn more about optimizing your center with Kangarootime, visit kangarootime.com
