Automate Your Parent Payments and Increase Your Profits

These days, early childhood and childcare centre owners are dealing with new business pressures from all angles. Your staffing costs are increasing and you’re dealing with families that are working harder than ever to make ends meet. Nevertheless, even operating within these current challenges, it is more possible than ever for childcare centre owners like you to reduce the cost of doing business, improve your cash flow and increase your profits. The key lies in using real time software to automate your most repetitive tasks (such as processing parent payments) and reduce the staffing costs that old-fashioned manual administration places on your business.

The most successful childcare centres are already reaping the cost-saving benefits of using software to automate their payments from parents. To get you started, we’ve put together our top tips to reducing the cost of processing parent payments in your childcare centre, so that you can improve your cash flow and increase your profits.

Reduce the time your staff spend chasing payments

Our clients in the childcare industry have told us that chasing payments takes up way too much of their valuable time. This common problem presents a perfect opportunity for you to investigate how payment software can help you reduce the labour burden (and therefore staffing costs) that all of this manual work places on your business.

Consider implementing an automated payment solution (such as direct debit) that can reliably bring in parent payments on the day that they’re due and automatically follow up any bounced payments too. By freeing up your staff from the time-consuming task of chasing payments from parents, you’ll be reducing the cost of doing business while improving your cash flow at the same time.

Find an automated payment solution that plays nicely with your childcare management software

People have come to expect a direct debit payment agreement from their fitness club, insurance provider and telecommunications company – so why not their childcare provider as well? The best automated payment providers can integrate their software with a range of management software from across a range of industries, so finding an automated payment solution that ‘plays nicely’ with your existing childcare management software should be easy. Look for a provider that offers a ‘no contract’ option so you can test it for a short period of time or make changes to your set-up later. The time it takes you to find and implement the right software will be a worthy investment – choosing the right payment software could reduce the time that childcare centres spend on payment administration.

Get your senior staff out of the administration office

With the strict quality standards of the National Quality Framework (NQF) placing increased staffing costs on your business, you don’t want your senior staff members stuck in the administration office repeatedly working through the same list of repetitive administration tasks day after day. Consider which of your most repetitive administration tasks could be delegated to junior non-Early Years Learning Framework staff – or, better still, automated through the right software – and put your senior staff members out the front so they can focus on liaising with parents and growing your business.

Calculate the real cost of managing parent payments

Do you really know how much time (and therefore money) you are spending on managing parent payments into your childcare centre? Well, now you can find out! Easily calculate the real costs of managing payments in your centre, and check out your potential cost savings, using our childcare cost saving calculator.