If your childcare center provides snacks and meals to your students, you could be leaving money from the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) on the table. This federal program helps reimburse care providers for serving nutritious foods to children.
But a major hurdle for childcare centers is properly documenting food served to be eligible for the program.
Using CACFP Food Program software that authenticates with signature capture a child’s attendance alongside the food your center serves children is often the missing piece in being able to maximize this subsidy. iCare Software is one of the few daycare apps that provides signature capture for data validation.
Yet, taking full advantage of CACFP can have a large impact on your bottom line. Minor changes to your documentation and accounting processes can help you become even more successful.
We’ll explain how iCare Software makes it easy to participate in and maximize the benefits of CACFP and how being a part of this program can pay for a huge part of your childcare software subscription.
Real-time Signature Capture (Authentication)
To collect CACFP subsidies, you’ll need a strong attendance tracking process. The first step in earning these subsidies is to prove what children were in your care each day. Once you have clear proof of attendance, you can move on to proving what snacks and meals you fed the child.
When the chef visits each classroom with a snack or meal, they can carry a phone or tablet with them to log snacks and meals directly to a child’s record. The digital signature for that interaction is logged in real-time and cannot be altered or tampered with in any way.
If you’d prefer to allow your chef to focus on meal preparation and distribution, your classroom teachers can input meal and snack data in real-time using your childcare app. And just like the chef’s updates, the teacher’s inputs cannot be changed or altered and provide a secure and reliable method for capturing the necessary data for CACFP subsidies.
Simpler Documentation Process
Alongside your real-time signatures for what child received a nutritious meal and when you can add in the specific menu details. When your chef creates the weekly meal and snacks list, they can program that information into iCare childcare management software.
That way, the data is placed right alongside the signature capture to provide a holistic view to your state to earn your subsidies. No added work or documentation preparation is required to maximize this important childcare subsidy.
Because this information is all real-time, you can’t mess up these records. You don’t need any additional paperwork or added office time to maximize CACFP using the iCare food distributions software programs.
Automated Reports to File Necessary Documentation
At the end of your state’s CACFP reporting period, you can automate reports documenting signatures, menu served and attendance data to send digitally to your state to earn your subsidy. There are no added steps for packaging this material or collecting it from various sources to complete the required monthly paperwork.
Covering Your Childcare Software Expenses
Once you invest in childcare software, you should maximize its benefits. Signature capture and ease of reporting for the CACFP program are unique features that iCare Software offers based on decades of industry experience and listening to our customers’ needs. You won’t find these helpful and easy-to-use features in other software programs.
But when used to their fullest, these tools can help pay for the software subscription. And based on your state’s program, you could get up to $100 of your childcare software reimbursed as a tool to track and report on CACFP.
Want to learn more about iCare Software and CACFP subsidies? Schedule a demo and a member of our team will show you how the software works. We’ll answer questions about how to maximize the usefulness of the software and its many tools. Learn how childcare software can be an investment in growing and improving your bottom line.