A monthly subscription to Nursery In a Box software vastly reduces the need to print anything – an instant cost saving.
Busy Little Bees is a Birmingham-based chain of three nurseries. It’s owned and managed by Jackie Davies and has approximately 30 staff and 250 children and babies it cares for across its sites.
Five years ago, Jackie came to the realisation that the paperwork was mounting up and the time and effort dedicated to administration was beginning to overwhelm her and her dedicated employees. It was quite simply taking up too much time and wasn’t delivering the level of information she needed at the speed it was required to run the nursery efficiently. The nursery was a long-term user of SAGE for invoicing and did most other jobs like registrations, occupancy levels and keeping parent information in Excel spreadsheets and various Word documents.
“We printed everything – all the invoices, all our child registrations, sickness and accident forms – literally everything,” explains Jackie.
“Across three settings, we probably had a monthly ink and paper bill of around £150 to £200 per site. Gross that up over a year, and it’s like hiring another person. When we went digital, that cost was gone, almost overnight as everything is contained within the new software.”
By contrast, a monthly subscription with nursery management software, Nursery In a Box is £200 per month for the whole business.
Gone too were the three archive boxes of paper per site, per year group which also provided a storage headache for a small nursery chain.
“There is always the worry that if you need to find one piece of paper, you have to wade through the correct boxes to find it, and paper can be lost, damaged or taken. Various guidelines stipulate that some of those pieces of paper must be kept for 18 to 21 years, so digitising them and storing the data remotely with full back up removes the headache and the worry for us,” said Jackie.
Jackie researched the market and found Nursery In a Box.
“I’m somewhat of a tech dinosaur, but the software was intuitive and really easy to use – it made sense. When I think back to life before it, I can’t believe how much faster everything is done. The time and paper that’s saved and the ability to communicate with parents in two-way conversations is much stronger, plus it gives us a digital trail of those discussions.”
Jackie also loves the fact that she can log into the system from home, where before she had to jump in the car and drive to the site in question to get the information she needed. Lockdown has highlighted the benefits of this further.
“I can access the information from anywhere as it’s required – it gives me the ability to manage the business much faster and more efficiently. I can even see things that would have taken me or a member of my team too long to work out – like how many of our parent ‘showrounds’ convert into new business. I’m in control much more than I was with the information at my fingertips upon which to make decisions.”
If you’d like to know more about how Nursery In a Box can help your nursery, please contact Dave on 07970 745561.
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