- Analysing business data provides beneficial insight into how you can expand your nursery
Using nursery data to drive your business
Capturing data is a fundamental requirement of the childcare industry. From children’s medical information to parents’ contact details, ethnicity, permission slips, allergies, postcodes, the list is endless. Whether it’s with a nursery management software package, simple Excel spread sheets, or manually into a book, data capture is a necessity.
But how much of this tranche of information do you ever get to actually analyse and exploit to drive your business forward? Data comparison allows you to create Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that help your nursery meet targets and develop in the right direction. However, in most settings, all of this vital and useful information sits on a shelf gathering dust and contributing nothing.
Making the most of your data isn’t as hard or longwinded as you may fear. Simply implement processes small parts at a time or invest in a management software package to be up and running quickly.
This week, as a starting point, we recommend three key pieces of data that can be regularly analysed to help you better understand your business and discover areas for growth.
Three essential reports that can provide business insight…
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Occupancy Levels
The complexity of manually recording child bookings and predicting room movements in your setting is time-consuming and prone to errors. Constant changes by parents make it hard to monitor the real availability, but knowing how many spaces you have available is clearly crucial to every aspect of your business.
Instantly discover availability by day, week, month or even year using Abacus
Even excel spread sheets fail to act as a reliable solution, as all data needs to be amended individually. If you fail to update one piece of information, this could cause an anomaly in your data.
Your process should be clearly mapped out so that when you need to alter a child’s booking, all relevant data is updated accordingly too.
Altering the date a child changes room, has lots of implications. Does your current system:
| - Update the registers accordingly? | - Alter the child’s invoices? |
| - Update all allergy, dietary and medical sheets? | - Inform both room leaders? |
| - Change the meal registers? | - Update staff registers and ratios? |
Without reviewing this data you risk missing payments or as a worst case, a child’s health. A genuinely holistic system will make sure that a simple change, such as a child’s booking pattern, is automatically fed through to every area of the business.
Updated information such as child’s age or room movements are automatically updated in Abacus to always provide occupancy levels in real time. Book a demonstration to see how!
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Finances
Having financial data regularly accessible for comparison and review provides a clear understanding of your business’s total income and expenditure.
To reduce the risk of bad debt, you should always hold a deposit for a child’s place and ensure that a parent’s debt never exceeds that amount. This is only possible if you can easily see both of these figures together at the same time. You should maintain a stubborn stance regarding debt; refuse bookings from a parent if their debt becomes too great, and triggering a prompt to prevent further bookings is a great advantage.
Each month, as a minimum, you should have quick access to detailed financial information so that you can immediately evaluate the business’s finances and chase any unpaid invoices or outstanding debts. Ideally you should be able to produce detailed account statements at the press of a button, but this is only possible if all of your information is held in one place.
Not only will this process give you the freedom to evaluate your business data but you can also easily export the data to Sage for your accountant to work with.
Abacus offers an unrivalled finance system that offers the most reliable invoicing process in the early years sector. Review your nursery’s finances with Abacus today!
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Managing the enquiry process
Do you know where all your enquiries originate? How many are won and lost? With the right tools it becomes easy to link useful data together, such as which staff have the most successful show round conversions, the most common reason behind parents rejecting your nursery and the best source of enquiries.
Simply capturing names and contact details of a parent in an enquiry book is inadequate. Not only is there a risk of human error, but data becomes lost in pages and impossible to analyse.
Free tool - insert all your postcodes into Batchgeo to see the locations of all your enquiries.
Your process should include where the enquiry came from, who is doing the show around and when to do a follow up call. You can then instantly link actions such as whether a particular staff member is continuously linked with successful show rounds, or the most effective advertising channel for your nursery.
Enquiries from your business website can go straight into your Abacus management system – find out how.
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Abacus generates more than 80 reports from your data that provides a host of key data to help evaluate the performance of your business. To book an online demonstration, explaining all the reports in details, fill out the form below.
