Save time on childcare admin with task automation
Automation is not a job killer
Automation may be considered a job killer, but it’s also a life-saver for childcare services looking for ways to streamline daily tasks while saving time and money. Sound impossible? It’s already a reality. And it’s time for you to start embracing this technology. Need a place to start? Here are 11 tasks that you should be automating if you want to save time on childcare admin daily.
1. Accounting, invoicing and taxes
One of the most feared tasks childcare service owners dread is accounting and sending out invoices. It’s tedious and time consuming. Thanks to automation, however, this is a concern that you no longer have to lose sleep over. There are many online invoicing services that automate bookkeeping tasks, ranging from recurring payments and payment reminders to storing receipts, real-time financial alerts, bank transfers, and even filing your taxes.
Instead of manually working with all this information, automation handles all of your bookkeeping needs. These services save you a ton of time (and a lot of headaches) when it comes to balancing your books and organising your files during tax season. Office, our admin platform, has several financial reports to help you, and our payment gateway, Xplor Pay, helps automate childcare payments from families. Additionally, Office integrates with Xero to help you save time on childcare admin.
2. Social media updates
Engaging and interacting with your audience through social media is a must for childcare owners. But posting content and responding to comments can eat up a large portion of your workday. Thanks to tools like Buffer and Hootsuite, you can schedule social media updates in advance so that you can focus on tasks that can grow your business.
Posts in Playground, our educator app, allows families to like and comment on Posts while allowing you to moderate comments to ensure a safe and respectful place. You can gain valuable insights to help boost family engagement by analysing views and reactions.
3. Website logins
It’s not uncommon for childcare owners to have multiple logins for various financial, social media and vendor accounts. That’s a lot of passwords to remember. Thankfully, password managers simplify this problem. Password managers aren’t just for convenience’s sake; think of them as good online hygiene, writes April Glaser for Wired Magazine.
“Most password managers save and generate secure passwords for you, meaning you only have to remember one password – the one that opens your vault.” In short, password managers save you time while keeping your sensitive information secure. Related: How to Create a Super Strong Password (Infographic)
Xplor Education also takes data security very seriously, offering Single Sign-On (SSO) for both Office and Playground.
4. Data backup
You never know when your computer is going to crash due to a virus or a hardware problem. In the past, this was devastating. Countless people have lost terabytes of data by not being prepared. The cloud, however, has rectified this problem. Your business data can now be automatically stored in the cloud, which means that if you do experience a crash, it can be quickly recovered.
The Xplor Education ecosystem is cloud based, meaning your data is available to you on multiple devices, provided you have an Internet connection.
5. Filling online forms
Google, as well as software programs like Roboform, lets you automatically fill in online forms. Using your stored information, such as your name, address, and billing info, helps you breeze through subscribing to emails, downloading content and signing up for new services. It may not sound like a big deal, but constantly filling out that information consumes more time than you may have realised!
You can help families in the same way by providing online enrolment forms. Not only will this make things easier for them, but it will save you time with all the data automatically flowing through to our admin platform, Office.
6. Employee scheduling
Are you scheduling employees using a pen, paper and Excel spreadsheet? It’s not just time consuming—it’s downright dreadful. Thanks to the rostering tools in Office, this task is now automated for you since they can balance your employee’s availability with your scheduling availability. Using Xplor Education’s Office can reduce your weekly scheduling to only 15 minutes—believe it.
7. Email marketing
Email marketing is another essential task for small business owners. But, again, this can be a time-consuming responsibility when responding to each and every email that you receive. Mailchimp, Aweber, and Drip will do everything from launch sequences, welcome messages, wishing customers a happy birthday, post-purchase follow-ups and abandoned cart recovery.
The Xplor Education all-in-one platform can help you in much the same way by allowing you to set up certain automated SMS messages, notifications and emails (like sending CWAs to parents/guardians).
8. Business analytics reporting
Without even realising it, you probably spend a lot of time switching from one business dashboard to another. Tools like Office, our admin platform, and Playground for educators have easy-to-navigate dashboards so you can access the data you need quickly and efficiently. In Office, you can monitor everything from analytics, marketing, sales, social media and customer support.
9. Customer support
Automated tools like Salesforce Small Business Service give you a chance to handle after-hours support, improve conversions, preemptively address any questions or concerns, reduce the workload for your team and assist customers with resolving a problem as quickly as possible.
10. Payroll
Services like Gusto and Wagepoint may not automate your payroll 100 per cent; they will take care of time-consuming tasks like employee onboarding and tax filing.
11. Lead magnets
A lead magnet is simply a “free offer you make in exchange for an email address (and possibly additional information).” “The purpose of a lead magnet is to inspire the people who are consuming your content to get on your email list. You’ll aim to convert them to customers in the future with lead nurturing tactics, most notably, email,” adds Feldman. But what if you’ve never created a lead magnet? No problemo. Designrr will do this for you in just 30 seconds without you even having to type a single word.
If you’d like to learn more about how the Xplor Education suite of tools can help your service save time on childcare admin, please get in touch—we’d love to hear from you!
