Driving better outcomes in childcare with unified data

When running a childcare centre, or out-of-school care service, data is crucial to smooth operations. 

From tracking attendance to ensuring compliance with staff-to-child ratios, data plays a vital role in optimising performance, enhancing the quality of care, and making sure legal obligations are met. 

Unfortunately for many childcare centre and care providers, this valuable asset goes largely untapped – scattered across various systems where it remains underutilised, severely hampering owners and managers from making timely and insightful decisions.  

This is especially true for those who manage multiple centres, where each centre uses its own systems. Manually compiling this data not only consumes precious time but also increases the likelihood of errors and oversights that could significantly impact the quality of childcare services, and even have financial and legal repercussions. 

Creating clarity through unified data analytics 

Consolidating data across disparate sources – be they multiple systems in a single centre or multiple systems across multiple centres – lets care providers gain a holistic view of their operations to optimise opportunities for growth and drive improvements to their services. 

When combined with powerful analytics tools, this unified data perspective can offer valuable insights and actionable information with real-time visibility into crucial metrics such as occupancy rates, revenue trends, and incident reporting.

At RSM, our data analytics team has helped many clients who own and manage established childcare services to gain this level of visibility using leading business intelligence platforms. 

Working closely with stakeholders, we identify prime data for consolidation which is usually sitting in an array of cloud-based platforms such as Xero, MYOB, Kidsoft, KinderM8, Deputy, Employment Hero, Childcare CRM, Tanda, HumanForce, Kinderloop, and so on. 

After extracting and transforming the data, we develop custom dashboards for analytics. This allows users to drill down into specifics on occupancy levels, resourcing, labour-to-revenue percentages, or whatever combination of data they wish to delve into. With data refreshing every few hours (or as often as needed), our clients can immediately see how their business is performing. For example, an in-built traffic light system makes it easy to monitor compliance with staff-to-child ratios across a 10-day average, and quickly correct course if the numbers aren’t adding up. 

This ability to play with data and look for issues and inefficiencies saved one of our clients a substantial amount of money when they uncovered a seemingly insignificant rostering error and were immediately able to rectify it. 

Another client has achieved huge time savings for their executive team, finance officers, and marketing department now that their data consolidation and reporting is automated. The availability of real-time data allows them to benchmark their centres against each other and have meaningful conversations with centre managers about performance, challenges, opportunities, training needs, and more. Excitingly, it has also freed their marketing department to spend less time on reporting admin and more time developing and tracking new campaigns.   

Spend 80% of your time on innovation

Be it the success of a new marketing campaign, a menu change, a shift in room structures, or a new incident policy, data makes it possible to track the progress of any new initiative in a care setting and understand if it’s producing the intended results. 

When this data is siloed, getting those answers takes away precious time and resources from busy personnel. However, when the data is automated and available in real-time via intuitive dashboards, executives can continually exploit it to drive greater improvements and greater innovation. 

This is something we are passionate about helping our childcare clients achieve at RSM. By consolidating data and automating the reporting process, our goal is to equip your leadership team with unprecedented insights that drive efficiencies and improvements that have lasting benefits for your centre, staff, parents, and the children in your care.  

For more information

For more information on data consolidation and analytics solutions for childcare centres, please contact Matthew Cunneen.