Childcare management software (CCMS) makes operating a center simpler and far more efficient. Perhaps one of the greatest benefits is effective Billing that syncs to attendance data with flexibility for you to set rates and apply unique discounts based on your rate charts.
The best software is flexible in when you automatically run bills, even allowing you to make the timeline unique per client in the case of drop-in care and other similar arrangements.
A CCMS can aid in organizing, managing, and growing a childcare business quickly while ensuring parents and students have a good experience. Some key tasks that technology can help with include:
- Billing
- Developmental milestone tracking
- Meal planning
- Managing student data and storing it securely
- Payment handling
- Parent-teacher communication
- Online enrollment and paperwork updates
- Staff scheduling
- Activity journal
- Photo sharing
- Reporting
No matter how difficult your Billing is, it can be automated with the right accounting system. Here’s a look at how a CCMS accounting can help with your childcare billing.
Flexible Billing Without Manual Input
One of the greatest challenges for the average community daycare center is that they don’t have the name recognition of the big chains near them. That means they have to attract customers with flexible attendance packages and options the big companies aren’t offering. This also helps maximize staffing to get the most out of your investment in regular wages.
Within a CCMS, you can set the following flexible billing options so that you don’t have to manage an hour-long process each week to issue accurate bills to parents.
- Global billing rules settings you can apply to each child
- Automatically charge parents for time children spend beyond their regular schedule
- Rate chart modeler that allows you to program discounts and rates based on various ages, number of children from one family attending (sibling discounts), programs enrolled in, etc.
- Audit trails for changes your staff makes to validate accounting
- Posting status options to meet your business rules and schedule, such as billing frequency
- A preview of your Billing before it officially goes out to parents so you can quickly verify the data
Childcare Billing Software Benefits
If you already have a childcare billing software tool and you’re spending hours running bills or updating bills based on attendance over the scheduled hours for a child, it’s time to evaluate your technology. You should be getting the following benefits from your childcare billing software.
- Automated Accurate Bills
While many childcare center directors still like to review and evaluate their childcare bills, they shouldn’t have to make drastic changes. Taking 30 minutes or so to check the previews of all bills before posting should be a quick review process that helps you ensure you set up custom billing data correctly, especially for new students. Managing the process should not take long and should reduce the billing errors you experience, which means fewer refunds and corrections.
- Faster Payment Collection
Digital invoices mean parents can go to the childcare app, review their bill and pay it right there. Or parents with full-time enrolled children that don’t need to review bills before posting them can set up automatic bill pay for faster, simpler payments. Regardless of whether parents review and then pay their bills through the app or use automatic Billing and check their receipts later, the payment collection process should be much faster than it would be with manual statements.
- Better Recordkeeping
Manual bill preparation can lead to errors. This makes your original documents inaccurate and can lead to recordkeeping challenges. And when you make a billing error, it means re-issuing the invoice or issuing a refund for an overcharge. With a CCMS, you can search for bills quickly to review invoices in case of a question or when tax season comes around.
- Quick Report Generation
Want to see which parents are frequently behind on paying their bills? Need to see which children have outstanding bills on their account? ICare Software comes with many pre-built reports, but you can also build custom reports using the simple drag-and-drop editor. You can run a report showing all accounts with outstanding or frequent late payments.
- Automated Receipt Generation
Generate receipts once a parent pays. This is useful for parents’ records and can help them with preparing for tax season. Plus, this way, you don’t need to generate tax paperwork manually, which can be a great benefit.
- Secure Payment Collection
Third-party payment systems can open both you and your clients up to risks. That’s why using a secure childcare software system is much better than working through other payment processing systems, such as PayPal or QuickBooks. You can also get some of the best credit card processing rates with iCare software.
Learn more about the many benefits of billing and payment processing with iCare software by scheduling a demo now.