Company Blog


Industry Review: Child Care

January 23, 2015

If you saw the recent State of the Union speech delivered by President Obama, you heard him highlight the need for quality child care in today’s economy. The president identified this as a major need for many working families by stating that this valued service is “not a nice-to-have but a must-have.” Children are indeed a valuable gift and choosing a day care facility is an important decision for any parent. If you are thinking of starting a day care service or perhaps already have a well established child care facility, a time and attendance program can help you easily manage both employees and children.

Employee Payroll
One of the primary reasons for using a time and attendance program in your child care facility is so you can track employee hours and overtime for payroll processing. You can eliminate the lack of accountability that comes with handwritten paper time sheets. It will also help you keep track of employee vacation, sick days, and personal time off. A time and attendance system is also a great way to keep track of intern hours or local students working toward their teaching credential or child care certification. Do your employees work in several departments within the day care? Do they receive different rates of compensation for teaching versus after-hours care? A quality time and attendance program is not only able to calculate your employee hours worked to simplify your payroll process, but also enables employees to change their activities throughout their shift so you can easily identify how many hours the employee spent in different departments and compensate them accordingly.

Student Security & Attendance
Do you have a line of children and parents waiting to check-in each day? Find a time and attendance program that has a PIN interface that is fast, easy-to-use, and works equally well with a touchscreen or keypad. A PIN interface uses a unique identification number for each child to quickly check-in and check-out. The PIN interface also provides complete anonymity because it presents a simple log-in screen and does not display child or employee information to prying eyes. In case of an emergency, you can still generate a list of children and employees who are on-site to make sure students and staff are quickly accounted for.

After-hours Billing
Are you manually keeping track of which parent needs to be billed for after-hours care and how much? The same time and attendance program you use for tracking employee hours worked and monitoring student check-in can be used as an easy way to invoice parents for care that goes beyond their designated pickup time. You can either simply review student attendance reports for late check-out times or set daily thresholds based on the number of hours students are in care. Either way, you will be able to quickly and accurately invoice parents for early drop off and late pickup fees.

A great time and attendance program will help you spend less time managing your day care and more time doing what you do best: teaching and caring for children. If you would like to find out what other day care and school time clock users are saying about Virtual TimeClock, please visit these time and attendance software reviews.