Apr 21, 20213 min read

How Automation Gives Managers Time to Spend with Children

Managers are often dismayed to find themselves more and more removed from what drew them to their job in the first place. Child Care Seer helps the daycare center director spend more time with the people who count the most: the children.

While many people dread that Monday morning, back-to-the-grind feeling, the day care center director used to face a particularly tedious task: dealing with billing.

“I used to come in to a pile of 50-60 checks on Mondays,” says Karen Inman, program manager at Callahan Learning Center. “I would have to tell my staff not to bother me for a couple hours, because it’s so easy to make a mistake. If you were called away from your desk, you’d have to figure out where you were.”

Manual billing used to be stressful and time-consuming. Now that Inman’s center uses Child Care Seer, an innovative new daycare management program, Mondays are a completely different experience. And so is every other day, for that matter.

Besides freeing up Monday mornings,utomated billing changes the whole tone of the center. Not having to discuss tuition with parents when they come in “is like having the elephant out of the room,” says Inman.

No longer chained to her desk, Inman is free to go out and greet families when they arrive at the center. She feels it’s just as important to set parents at ease as their children, because parents are sometimes more even more anxious than their offspring. “Parents are creatures of habit, too. They also thrive off routine.”

Inman and her staff set the relaxed tone, which trickles down to parents and in turn to children. “The number one complaint of parents in most daycare centers is ‘I never see the director.’ That’s not the case here.”

More than simply saying hello to the children in the morning, Inman can to get to know them, since she now has time to drop into classrooms throughout the day. She can give parents feedback on how their child is doing when they ask, instead of having to direct their question to the child’s teacher.

“When I am in my office, and I hear a cry now, I can actually recognize whose cry it is,” Inman says. She also gets to witness the milestones, such as hearing a child’s first words or watching them develop a new skill.

She’s grateful that Child Care Seer gives her staff the opportunity to be real people, to be personable, and to make her customers feel important, rather than having to ask them about their tuition. “Every day this one little boy comes in, and we always go through the same routine with checking his temperature per COVID-19 guidelines. He has me check his mom’s temperature, and then his jacket, his sippy cup, whatever. He knows that “green means go and red means no” and he loves having me check different things every day.”

The inventor of Child Care Seer, Tom Callahan, added, “Green means go is exactly the goal of our software. We have found, for centers that adopt Seer, increased happiness in all the people who work at and use our customer’s centers. Owners, directors, teachers, parents, and children all benefit by the automation our tool provides by making a very difficult job more enjoyable and easier.”

Inman also had a first-time mom enroll at the center, and she was able to coach the mother through the experience of dropping off her child for the first time. The time she spent with the mother helped the child to feel more at ease on his first day. When the mother called from the parking lot to see how he was doing, Inman had time to check and reassure her that he seemed happy.

“Building connections is the most rewarding part of the job. Nothing’s more important than making connections with our families.”