Without child care billing software, childcare accounting could be a full-time job. But as an administrator, you have so much more to focus on than just your books. These other tasks include marketing, staffing, enrollment, and communicating with parents about their needs and the needs of their children.
To avoid focusing on your books all the time, you need outstanding child care billing software that does the heavy lifting for you. Automating repetitive tasks will reduce manual data entry and streamline your daily work.
Software tailored to meet the needs of childcare centers handles invoicing, payment collection, reconciling those payments and reporting.
Learn the key functions you should be looking for within childcare accounting software and the ways that a high-quality system can make a difference in your business.
Invoicing with Child Care Billing Software
Invoicing for childcare centers is incredibly tedious. Children have different rates based on your agreements with parents. And some children you bill based on attendance, such as those enrolled in aftercare.
Without highly intelligent and flexible child care billing software designed for childcare businesses, the task of invoicing is incredibly time-consuming. iCare Software offers a rate chart that allows you to program a child’s tuition billing based on certain characteristics and discounts.
Select various discounts and the billing format you want to use for the child when you enroll them at your center. And as they graduate from classroom to classroom, you can easily adjust these rates to enable continued automatic billing based on the child’s new classroom and enrolled programs.
Create recurring or one-time bills for activities, such as field trip billing. Turn invoicing into a simple weekly review activity that takes a maximum of 30 minutes instead of a full day.
Collecting Payments
An online payment gateway makes it simple for parents to set up recurring payments using ACH or a credit card. These online gateways also help with reminding parents when a credit card is expiring.
But the hard part about allowing for credit card payments is the fees that childcare centers then incur. You could face fees of 2-5 percent of the total amount you bill parents for tuition.
iCare’s credit card rates are some of the lowest in the industry and could save you thousands of dollars per year in fees. Take a look at our child care billing and administration comparison to other leading childcare software systems.
Billing parents is just one challenge with collecting payments. Tracking down overdue and outstanding payments is another aspect that can be time-consuming for childcare administrators. Childcare accounting software allows you to run reports on outstanding and overdue payments to avoid bad debt within your business. Know who owes you what and automatically resend overdue bills as a reminder to parents.
And for children that you receive subsidies for, you can easily pull reporting data that verifies their attendance to package and send to your local authority. Verifying this information can be time-consuming as the government wants specific data. Failing to include verified information could mean back and forth interactions with your state or that you don’t get the payment that the state owes you.
Effective accounting software can solve this challenge by making reports simple to export and automating the process.
Payment Reconciliation Automation
Reconciling what bank transactions match up with your invoices is another tedious task that no one really wants to do. Good software fetches information from your connected business bank account and automatically pairs that data with your invoice data.
The best accounting software shows you your bank account balance, pending invoices and payment status on a simple dashboard so you can review your finances at a glance and get back to focusing on your business.
Accounting Reporting and Forecasting
Finally, it’s helpful to know what your budgets will look like as you progress through the school year and into the next one. Accounting software helps you run reports to forecast your budgets and understand enrollment changes so you can fill gaps and always maximize your center’s capacity.
Knowing how your finances are doing at any given point is only one aspect of specialized accounting software designed specifically for the childcare industry. To be able to market your center and attract new students to fill vacancies, you have to know where those vacancies are.
See how iCare Software automates accounting work to allow you to focus on your business instead of your finances. Schedule a demo today.