5 Features Every Childcare App Needs to Have in 2020

Do you find it difficult to manage all the day-to-day stuff at your preschool or daycare? Childcare operators have a lot to juggle. Whether it’s the compliance and regulatory side of things, or providing updates for individual children and interacting with parents. Finding ways to handle all of these tasks is challenging.

One solution that many childcare centers are turning to is software as a service (SaaS) daycare apps. These innovative apps provide childcare operators with a seamless experience that can integrate many of these essential functions.

But what features should you prioritize?

You need to consider the bigger picture before you can answer that question. Start by asking yourself these questions:

How does your daycare handle admin?
Do you want the ability to provide daily updates to parents?
Are you interested in letting parents engage with posted photos and stories?
Do you need your daycare app to offer billing and payroll?
Will you use your platform to streamline paperwork and other daycare compliance?

Don’t feel overwhelmed.

Most childcare management software can handle all of these things. So, let’s explore what features you need to prioritize.

1. Enrollment and Registration

The enrollment process is one area where many daycares and preschools struggle. The sudden influx of new children, paperwork, and questions from parents can be overwhelming.

Childcare apps are designed to simplify this process. They can do things like:

Eliminate the need to fill out paperwork manually
Help you plan class sizes, available resources, and more
Create individual profiles for each child that you can modify at any time
Provide your staff with a centralized location to access essential information

An automated childcare enrollment process keeps you in control, makes it easier for parents to register, and lets you predict and stay ahead of change.

2. Personalized Profiles for Children

Parents love staying involved with what’s happening with their children at daycare. Whether it’s pictures from an activity, lunchtime menus, or minor updates on their progress, they want to stay in the know.

Childcare apps solve this problem and reduce the amount of work you have to do. Rather than spending hours on the phone, you can snap a quick photo, add a caption, and upload it. This keeps parents happy as they can see their child’s progress.

But these profiles do more than just update parents.

They also help your staff keep tabs on important information like:

Allergies
Nap schedules
Required documentation that is set to expire
Other internal notes that all staff need to know

All of these things help eliminate paperwork, reduce admin costs, and let your childcare providers spend more time interacting with their students.

3. Attendance Tracking

How much time does your staff currently waste manually logging attendance? If you’re like most preschools and daycares, it’s probably a reasonable amount of time.

Daycare apps have built-in attendance tracking capabilities. This can help you simplify your billing processes, track absences, and reduce your administrative workload.

Attendance tracking provides your daycare with visual reports that make it easy for you to keep track of everything.

4. Centralized Parent Communication

Parents care about more than just their kids. They also want to know what’s happening with the daycare. Keeping parents up to date at all times isn’t easy. Some preschools and daycares may solve this through newsletters, but a childcare management app is a better choice.

Here’s why:

Parents can contact individual staff within a daycare through your app
You can send personalized updates about a child’s progress that are more visible than traditional emails
Send and track push notifications to your parents for important updates, invoices, and other sensitive information
Your staff can quickly view all contact information for a child and their parents in one convenient location

A rich feature set like this reduces the amount of time it takes your staff to communicate with parents. That means they can spend more time focusing on the children they are caring for and other important tasks at your daycare.

5. Seamless Billing

Your daycare and its staff deserve to get paid for the good work they do. Many daycares still rely on outdated invoicing systems. These outdated systems can cause a lot of problems and impact your ability to provide high-quality care.

Daycare apps make billing a stress-free process by automating tedious tasks. You can use a daycare app to:

Automate your billing process so you can maintain positive cash flows and get your staff paid on time
Make paying invoices a low-barrier task by integrating payment systems into your childcare management software
Keep track of unsent and outstanding invoices, and send reminders as needed
Improve the visibility of your invoices so you can get paid on time

Get All of These Features and More with Kinderpass

Kinderpass is a new daycare app that offers all of these features and more. We understand the daily struggles you face as a childcare provider because we are former childcare providers ourselves.

Kinderpass seamlessly integrates all of your essential processes into one convenient platform and app. We are currently offering beta invites to interested preschools and daycares and will publicly launch in spring.

What does this mean?

We are offering daycare providers 6-months of free access to Kinderpass. This allows you to use the software to improve your internal processes, while it allows us to identify potential bugs. It’s a win-win for everyone involved!