Software has largely become an indispensable part of modern business. When used properly, it offers significant benefits by helping businesses improve their operations and run more efficiently.
Software must be chosen carefully and deliberately, and can be incredibly useful for childcare businesses in particular. A solid tech stack should support employees through their day-to-day tasks, as well as improve and facilitate the overall experience for all stakeholders, from managers to parents.
Here are just some of the benefits that can be afforded to your business by implementing software.
Ramps Up Productivity
With advances in tech, a lot of business software now includes AI features that allow businesses to ramp up their productivity — without hiring any more employees.
Machine learning is able to tackle the more tedious tasks required during business operations, which frees up staff members to get on with the more important tasks that demand a human mind. In this way, software can help your business scale up and simultaneously cut costs.
Boosts Efficiency
Applying software, when done right, will create efficiencies in every part of your childcare business. For starters, as mentioned above, automation helps to cut the time your team is spending on admin tasks – a major time drain in the childcare sector.
Generally speaking, business software also helps improve communications between various stakeholders, thereby boosting efficiency. For example, Kidsoft includes a communications platform that facilitates the process of emailing families, which cuts down on unnecessary time spent writing and sending emails.
Furthermore, having all your business ops information in one place and easily accessible to all relevant parties means that staff members will spend less time trying to dig out information from filing cabinets or hard drives.
Improves Compliance
Many industries — including childcare — are subject to sometimes complex regulations that they must comply with. Implementing software, such as 1Place Childcare, is key to ensuring that everyone feels comfortable operating under these regulations by allowing staff to track processes and more easily maintain compliance.
Facilitates Integration
One reason it’s important to have the right software is to ensure that your different tools integrate seamlessly to make processes even more efficient. Using various software that isn’t able to interact will make certain tasks easier but can still lead to headaches if you need to transfer data from one tool to another, for example.
However, choosing the optimal tech stack for your childcare business means that your tools will sync and operate in tandem, ensuring that no information gets lost along the way and making it easier to track tasks and processes. Kidsoft offers an ever increasing list of public API’s allowing our clients to integrate with more platforms than just our existing ecosystem. This coupled with advanced BI and Data Visualisation integration offers an exciting roadmap that is constantly evolving.
Promotes Accountability and Ownership
A major pain point for business owners is accountability when things go wrong due to human error. When trying to solve problems, it can be difficult to find out exactly what went wrong and why.
With the right childcare software, managers can put this headache behind them. Each user will have their own ID on the system, which makes it easier to track down the source of any errors that arise.
This promotes ownership of tasks, and also enables managers to have better visibility on the actions being taken by employees.
Prevents Lost Information
The loss or misplacement of vital business information — whether it be payroll, HR documents, or client information — can be a major issue for business owners in the childcare industry.
But when humans are running processes, this kind of loss is bound to happen from time to time. Information accidentally gets trashed, lost forever in the wrong folder, or just never gets collected in the first place.
Software can ease this process by providing one centralised location to store all your important information, automatically sorting it into the relevant place and prompting users to add necessary details when appropriate.
Furthermore, having a centralised location for all your business information means that employees won’t lose as much time searching for various files.
Improves Onboarding
Business software is designed to be user friendly — after a short training session, most childcare employees will understand the ins and outs of how to use it for whatever tasks they may require it for.
This is a vastly different experience from having to learn and carry out various different processes, all created by different people for different reasons. Software makes onboarding easier and gets new employees up to speed quicker. All the checks you can put in place also lessens the risk of new employees making mistakes that impact the business.
Any one of these streamlining benefits should be enough of a reason to consider implementing software to help your business operations. Put them all together, and you’ll see a huge improvement — saving you energy, time, and money.
Contact us to learn more about how Kidsoft can help streamline your childcare centre and business operations.
