Why a robust administration process would benefit your business

Over the past five weeks we have offered advice and tips to streamline your key childcare administration. This week, we demonstrate how the regimes instigated by Abacus Nursery Management Software can create an infrastructure that allows you to complete day-to-day administration in a fraction of the time, leaving you to focus on more important matters.

Abacus is uniquely flexible, designed with every type of childcare provider in mind. The system is tailored by a team of specialists to your nursery’s requirements, providing you with a system that closely reflects everything you do today, whilst bringing new processes designed to develop your business even further. This balance ensures you receive a maximum return on your investment in the shortest possible time.

Here we look at each of the main areas where Abacus can benefit your business.

Store and access data securely and quickly

Traditional storage methods are simply no longer adequate to securely store the crucial data you hold on children and families. In the case of an unforeseeable event, rather than risk serious consequences to your business, transferring data to an online system which creates multiple backups and allows information to be accessed easily, gives you far greater security and flexibility. Wave goodbye to the days of travelling to different computers, or carrying data backups around with you.

If you have more than one setting it becomes even more difficult to manage data across multiple sites. As an online system, all data in Abacus is completely up to date and can be securely accessed from anywhere with an internet connection.

Don’t put off change! You may not be confident using computers and/or the internet, but Parenta provide unlimited training for you, and any of your staff, whenever you need it.

Make parents responsible for updating their records

When needed, are you confident that all emergency contact details are correct, with the latest mobile phone numbers? Or that parents have told you of every allergy or dietary requirement their child has? Protect yourself and put the onus back on parents to let you know of changes to their details.

This can easily be achieved using Parent Portal, a professional feature of Abacus that provides parents with secure, read-only access to their child’s data. They can advise you of changes required using the communicate feature, as well as highlighting missing data, request changes or even book extra sessions. Nothing changes on the system until you enter the changes, so you remain in complete control.

This process provides a manageable platform that ensures all data is easily kept up-to-date and that face-to-face communication with parents is related to topics such as their child’s development, rather than requesting changes to their records.

Parent Portal is just as secure as Abacus. Parents have restricted access to their data 24/7 via your business website or a direct link. All you need to do is send them a quick email with their login details to let them know about this impressive feature!

Quickly produce professional invoices

As we revealed last week, there are a number of things you can do to encourage parents to pay on time, but these may not be easy for you to implement with your current system.

Abacus is renowned for its invoicing capabilities and how it radically reduces the whole process. With unbelievable flexibility, you can configure your system to split invoices between bill payers stating how much of the whole invoice they are responsible for, bill for sessions at different rates, and automatically calculate discounts, vouchers and free entitlement. Of course much more is available, and can be revealed during a live demonstration of the software.

For practitioners completing invoices manually, the real issue becomes time. Abacus’s simple process takes a minute to complete. This may seem like an exaggeration, but once you see the whole process in action, you’ll understand why so many customers list this as the number one benefit of implementing Abacus.

Collecting Debt

To stay sustainable, it is vital that you manage any bad debt sensitively but firmly, backed up by strong policies and procedures regarding outstanding fees.

A customer recently told us that most of their parents put childcare bills at the bottom of the priority list behind bills such as council tax and electricity. This can be an awkward situation to handle, so Parenta can do the chasing of fees for you. Using our unique Fee Planner Direct-Debit Service, an optional extra with Abacus, we will collect whatever amount is due, on a nominated day each month, and then pay it directly into your bank account 4 days later.

On average, each setting using Fee Planner receives over 98% of the fees requested, on time and without any chasing.

Managing your payments benefits all parents and children as you are not only caring for their children but you will also free up money to invest back in the nursery, rather than writing it off as bad debt. By letting a third party organisation do the nasty work you reduce the risk of damage to your relationship with the parents.

Ways that Abacus helps:
- Direct-Debit payments
- Invoices prepared on time each month
- Remittance slip included with invoice
- Easily track and manage debt
- Statements produced at the click of a button
- Optional on screen prompts for children with outstanding payments

Access to reports

So much time is spent each day preparing registers, occupancy reports, meal lists, allergy lists – the list goes on! This is awfully time-consuming and often results in key business data never being analysed and left neglected. Abacus can instantly present you with 78 comprehensive reports that help you analyse your business.

By introducing a system that generates reports at the click of a button, you suddenly have the time to study the information you never got round to producing. You can generate reports such as staff training needs, enquiry conversions and long term cash flow forecasts and annual occupancy reports with absolute ease, providing invaluable insight into all areas of your business.

Sharing information with staff can boost team morale too, and Abacus can tell a room leader a whole range of vital information about the children in their care with one simple report.

Using Abacus you can
- Easily produce all daily registers and occupancy reports
- analyse Future Fees
- review successful enquiry channels
- monitor staff qualifications and any training required
- access aged-balanced reports
- produce long term occupancy reports
- even see how many places you can sell tomorrow without having to pay another member of staff

Let us make your childcare administration simple. During a live demonstration, we will happily discuss your administrational requirements to create a successful solution that gives you maximum return on your investment.

Book your online demonstration today by completing the form below.