PhilEH
A Car Seat for Your Daycare Data
Of course you know the motto “Safety First”. On field trips I’m certain every one of the toddlers and preschoolers in your care (and perhaps a teddy bear too) is lovingly helped into their car seats to keep them secure. You may even have posters displayed or a song to sing about being safe. In fact at my children’s elementary school “Be Safe” is the very first part of their school motto.
Car seats for children? Well, of course. That kind of precaution is so ingrained in us it’s practically automatic. But how is using a car seat in any way related to the childcare database entered on your computer? Well, your data is important for sure. Can you imagine losing all that accounting history – payments received, deposits made, balances owed – not to mention basic name, address and emergency contact information, immunizations and more? It could be not only time consuming, but perhaps impossible to accurately re-create.
So what do I mean by a “car seat” for your data? Continue reading
Pinewood Derby Day at Procare
In celebration of July 4th and just to have a little fun, the staff at Procare Software® recently ran our 1st annual pinewood derby style race known as the “Firecracker 5000”. Each person built their car starting with a standard pinewood derby car kit and customized it to their liking. There were separate competitions for speed and cleverness of design.
The secret to a fast race, according to winner Steve Suarez (tech support), was to use massive amounts of dry graphite to lubricate the wheels, so much so, that the sleek yellow car ended up graphite gray by the time the race was finished. Coming in second was software engineer Danny Pomeroy with Andy Spliefhof (web design & marketing) taking home the third place trophy.
For the design portion of the competition each person voted for their three favorite cars. There were a lot of nicely crafted cars so it was hard to choose but the top three are shown below. Continue reading
New! Pre-Register Children Online
Finger painting is fun all right, but it can sure get messy! Perhaps the pre-enrollment process at your child care business is like that too – a little bit messy? Although you want to follow up with families who express interest you don’t want to spin your wheels or spend excessive staff time on data entry or paperwork until they’re ready to put some money down and officially enroll.
Clean Up Your Wait List & Pre-Registration
How many times have you spoken with an enthusiastic parent – ready to get on your waiting list – only to discover a short time later they found other child care or are no longer interested? You might refer to this period before enrollment as the “research” or “waiting” stage when a family wants to be on your list, but isn’t yet ready to commit – or perhaps is waiting to see if a slot will open up for their child.
Of course you could spend time manually taking down information about their children, or ask them to fill out your full set of enrollment forms, but there is an easier way. Continue reading
Email Families at Your Daycare
New Email Features for Your Child Care Business
Getting messages and announcements out to parents is a crucial part of communications between your child care center and your families. But how can you quickly get the information out? Email, of course, is a great tool – but there may be different ways you want to use it.
With that in mind Procare Software® has recently added some new email options to their popular Child Care Management Software.
New! Copy Email Addresses
The ability to easily copy a list of email addresses has been a popular request and now it has become a standard feature! You may even select a category of families to include, such as all those with a child in a certain classroom, then further decide which families among those should be sent your email. Continue reading
Fund Accounting for Child Care
Are you burning through your jar of pencils trying to manually track receivables and payments for each of your child care and after school programs? Let Procare Software® save the wear and tear on your eraser with the newly released Fund Accounting feature mentioned in our recent article on What’s Coming Soon to Procare.
Fund Accounting is the perfect way to track accounts receivables, as well as the funds collected, for each of your individual programs. For example you may want to know what is owed for preschool separately from school age or registration fees. Continue reading