Child Care Software for Attendance & Scheduling

Scheduling Management - Unless all children and staff come for the same hours every day, a childcare center can benefit from computerized schedule management. Typically, this involves entering a schedule for children and staff, and allowing you to analyze and report on these schedules. Most programs allow you to maintain some form of recurring schedule that repeats each week (or sometimes several weeks). In addition, the more sophisticated products allow you to apply these recurring schedules to a calendar, which factors in holidays, vacations, temporary schedule changes, etc.

If your childcare center or school-age program operates on a different schedule during the summer, it is very useful to have software that can track separate schedules with start and end dates for each child. In this way, you can report on future slot availability while still maintaining the child's current schedule.

A key feature of child care scheduling is reporting that allows you to better match staffing levels to anticipated child attendance, thereby better managing the greatest expense in every center: payroll. In addition, for those centers whose fees are based on the child's schedule, the information should also be usable for calculating fees automatically.

Attendance Management can encompass everything from simple attendance sheets that provide an opportunity for parents (or staff) to mark attendance to sophisticated computerized time-clocks that allow parents and staff to clock-in and out on the computer. This technology might use bar-codes, pin numbers, or even touch screens to allow sign-in. Even more state-of-the-art is the option to use biometric fingerprint readers to instantly identify authorized pickups and link to the schools attendance keeper. Each technology has its advantages and childcare software that supports a variety of input mechanisms is usually best.

Effective childcare attendance management software can:

• Increase revenue by ensuring that fees for extra hours, late pickup, etc. are charged.
• Provide accurate information for payroll calculations.
• Enhance the center's ability to evaluate staffing efficiency.
• Anticipate future staffing needs.
• Support parent communication by displaying messages as part of the check-in process.
• Improve center professionalism.

Door Access Control - By interfacing the time-clock function to an electronic door release, some products provide a low-cost mechanism to control access to the childcare facility. In today's security-conscious world, access control of this nature is appreciated, if not demanded, by cautious parents. Unlike stand-alone door access systems, integration makes it easy to provide every parent a unique access code that is automatically disabled when they leave your program.