Technology is growing rapidly.
How we communicate, work and run our businesses continue to evolve and so do our expectations of what we can do, how we do it and how fast it can be done. If you are a childcare director, owner or operator, it’s important that you are familiar with these developments.
When you are growing your early childhood centre, you invest a lot of time, energy, love, and money into it. So when it comes to your software, you need to ensure that the decisions you make for your investment pay off.
The choices you make about the technology you adopt is critical to ensuring your business remains competitive.
Childcare Management Software is crucial in terms of how your business performs. By making sure you have the best and most suitable software, you are building a stable platform for your early learning centre. Your digital platform can be a real asset to your child care centre, so make sure it is the right one!
Here are five key signs that your business needs to upgrade its software:
1. You are doing “less work” and more “paperwork”
From children’s enrolment forms, learning journals, parent’s handouts, photos and daily attendance sheets for your staffs and children, you see the printing costs eating a big hole in your budget.
The right administration software should be able to help you digitise, and where possible ‘automate’ most of your centre’s core administrative requirements. Some of the features that can bring about a significant difference to your workload and paperwork during the setup process (and going forward) :
2. Your business goals cannot be achieved with your current software
Increasing revenue and reducing costs are at the top of every successful childcare centre business plan. Technology at its core is useful. It allows you to do more with less. But every business will outgrow its technology if it doesn’t upgrade. If it’s become rigid, makes it hard for you to take your business where you want it to go, it’s likely one of the leading causes of poor customer experience.
When your technology grows with your business you can easily increase your enrolments, increase your occupancies with parents making the casual bookings and send daily updates to the families which delight your customers, you will find it easier to run your day-to-day operations and most importantly, create customer satisfaction.
“We have been with Xap for nearly 2 years now. With the new CCS introduction, we needed to update our software, the thought of new software and transitioning to digital documentation did scare us but Xap took that fear away. I find Xap Platform very user friendly. It provides you with a quick view of what the educators are doing and help us maintain our ratios. We used story park and moved to Xap and over educators just love it”
3. You want to operate your centre at full capacity but managing casual booking is a nightmare.
You have vacancies in your centre but it is quite difficult to communicate it to your families. You use external software to send emails to families but parents don’t have a way to make a booking when they need. You find texting parents back and forth to arrange the casual booking and sorting out the variable invoice manually is just not workable.
Many childcare management systems are quite rigid when it comes to accommodating the variability in your booking pattern and business model.
If you feel like your business should be doing better because it’s a great centre and a fun place to be, you need to think about how you can improve your business processes and create a better customer experience.
4. You are managing endless folders and its the only way to get hold of each child’s details.
You badly wish you could access all the required details of each child in one glance, with the option to filter them out based on your needs.
You also find it difficult to trace immunisations for all children and to chase parents to supply the immunisation status certificates.
Think about how you feel when things are easy. Think, if there was a system to send automatic reminders when important documents are about to expire when immunisation is due for the child and when you see, some details are missing in child profile and it is with a click of a button to send the reminder to the guardians to complete the details. If it’s easy, you’re delighted and all parents are delighted.
5. It’s been a while since your last update
How frequently do you update your mobile phone or laptop? The answer is different from person to person. The same can be said for business’ and their technology. If it’s been a couple of years and you’re still using the same software, it’s probably time to think about an upgrade. Business’ grow, old technology doesn’t.
Consider how frequently your current provider has improved the functionality of their product. Have they released new features? Have they listened to your feedback to make improvements?
The rate of change is a critical indicator of whether you should consider updating your software. Even a little change can make a big difference.
Maintaining outdated systems is a costly exercise and has little productivity benefits. Your parents and employees will also complain about having to use old technology. Weigh up the true cost and ROI of investing in a software upgrade, with this front of mind.
Contact us if you’re considering updating your childcare management software, or if you’d like to learn more about what Xap has to offer.
Xap is disrupting the childcare industry with 100+ features and AI-driven analytics for the enterprise. Xap makes the most complicated tasks fast, simple, digital, and reliable.
