ChildFriendly vs TimeSavr Daycare Management Software
When it comes to Canadian daycare software tools, ChildFriendly and TimeSavr are two of the most frequently researched daycare management systems. Both are based in Alberta, giving them specialized knowledge about Alberta childcare and the provincial governments regulations. Let’s do a deep drive into a comparison between ChildFriendly and Timesavr.
ChildFriendly Pro vs. TimeSavr
Registration
TimeSavr makes it easy for parents and guardians to enroll their children in the daycare program, and allows you to customize new child profiles according to your needs. Emails go out to parents when children are moved off the wailist. The online form can be embedded on your website for accessibility.
ChildFriendly offers a unique SMART registration system, which lets you create “proposals” for a child, automatically alerting you and moving them up in the system as they age up. This is a huge timesaver, eliminating the need to constantly check when children are ready to move up or age out of the daycare or preschool. Registration is easy to do online, with waitlist options and a variety of customizations, including setting specific milestones and agreements for parents to complete during the registration process. Many filters are available to help ensure all steps are taken before a child is officially registered.
Winner: ChildFriendly
Attendance and Ratio Tracking
ChildFriendly offers a powerful attendance module with contactless check-in and out. The system automatically monitors child attendance, hours and location. You can easily transfer children between groups and rooms to ensure compliance with staff-child ratio requirements. ChildFriendly also lets you organize and track children for safe and efficient transport to and from school.
TimeSavr is a similarly great attendance features, with ratio tracking features built into their attendance module. TimeSavr has a useful tool to run checking ratios, whereas ChildFriendly offers immediate notifications by having rooms change colours and a warning symbol come up when ratios are out of sync. Both systems let you print out attendance records by day or month for licensing inspections
Winner: ChildFriendly
Staff Scheduling and Tracking
TimeSavr helps ensure child-staff ratios are maintained by linking child attendance with staff attendance in real time. ChildFriendly offers the same feature, so you can see where every child and staff is at any given time. Both systems have employee profiles and digital attendance tracking for staff, and educators use the app to clock in and out. This is useful not only for payroll but for showing licensing that you met staff coverage requirements. ChildFriendly goes a step above, with categories for the type of work being done, including childcare, admin, and other duties. This is extremely helpful for provincial reporting. ChildFriendly also provides digital file storage as well as automatic reminders of any upcoming reviews and expiries such as first aid or criminal checks. TimeSavr also tracks staff certifications and other expirations and provides reminders.
Winner: Tie
Incident and Illness Reporting
ChildFriendly has an excellent digital process for logging both incident and illness reports. A staff member can log an incident report quickly and easily, adding all required fields. Reports are sent right away to an administrator for approval before being sent to parents. Likewise, illness reports are extremely detailed, and centers add their own symptom criteria and rules for parents to view when they receive their child’s illness report.
TimeSavr includes digital forms for incident and medication reporting, though they are not as detailed as ChildFriendly’s. An administrator can log an incident report in TimeSavr, capturing the details of what occurred. Many centers have created their own templates to use, whereas ChildFriendly has everything ready to use. A child’s absence or early departure due to illness is easily noted in the system. ChildFriendly also lets parents or staff easily add an absence or early departure due to illness.
Winner: ChildFriendly
Medication Administration
TimeSavr allows staff to record when medication is given and track ongoing medication schedules. While not quite as detailed as ChildFriendly’s options, medications are also logged for reporting.
ChildFriendly has an intuitive medication feature that lets staff view any required medications for the day. This can be filtered by room or group as well. Upcoming medications as well as past due medications appear if a med is past due. The tracking feature lets the staff easily mark off any completed medications. These logs are all tracked in reporting as well.
Winner: ChildFriendly
Parent Communication
ChildFriendly offers a robust parent app, letting parents instantly see when staff have added a journal to their child’s file – there are multiple journal options including activities, nap, diapering/potty, eating, and more. ChildFriendly also has unlimited photo uploads, so staff can easily add photos to journals for parents to see. Push notifications with ChildFriendly are are being released in coming months, so that parents can also be notified as soon as journals are posted for their child. There is also instant messaging between educators and parents with the ChildFriendly parent app.
TimeSavr’s focus historically was more on administration than on parent engagement, but it does include some parent communication features. There is a TimeSavr Parent Portal/App where parents can log in to view their child’s reports and account. TimeSavr can automatically email daily reports to parents. These daily reports include activities like naps, meals, and diaper changes that educators entered during the day. TimeSavr does allow uploading photos and notes to a child’s daily report. TimeSavr does not have messaging between parents and educators.
Winner: ChildFriendly
Invoices and Payments
TimeSavr automates invoices and receipts to parents by email, which keeps financial communication clear and documented. Invoices are easily created for individual families or batches can be generated for all families at once. The system automatically pulls in monthly tuition and applies any subsidies or grants. Pre-authorized debit and credit payments are also available.
ChildFriendly simplifies the billing process by letting you generate multiple invoices at once. Clients frequently report huge satisfaction with ChildFriend’s invoicing and payment module, which saves a lot of admin time. The system also easily syncs with Quickbooks and lets centers set up pre-authorized debit or credit card payments. Grants, such as Alberta Affordability Grants, are easily added to the system, making payment breakdowns simple and easy for centers to handle.
Winner: Tie
Health and Safety Information
ChildFriendly prioritizes health and safety with comprehensive child profiles and easily accessible allergy information as well as emergency contacts. Staff can view a child’s health & allergy information with a quick click on their profile. Allergies are also easily viewed in the main dashboard and can be printed out by room. Detailed reports are also available. Likewise, safety information such as emergency contacts can be viewed online and printed out in detail for storage in a binder, if desired. These reports are readily available for any inspectors.
TimeSavr provides tools to manage children’s health and safety information systematically. It can store allergy information and emergency contacts and print them in reports as needed. For instance, an “Allergies” report is available at the click of a button, which would list each child and their allergens. Both systems let you record and add immunization records for children. They can both track any expiries for items such as a medication expiry.
Winner: Tie
Reports
Both ChildFriendly and TimeSavr offer a variety of useful reports and compliance tools. Both systems were created by daycare operators specifically to address the administrative burdens of licensed childcare in Alberta and as a result, both ChildFriendly Pro and TimeSavr are highly aligned with Alberta’s regulatory requirements. They make handling government paperwork effortless.
Attendance is compiled into daily reports automatically for both systems, which staff can easily download. ChildFriendly offers the addition of letting you filter by group or room. Child hours are also tallied for both systems, which means that when it’s time to do subsidy claims or affordability grant reporting, the system already has the exact number of hours each child attended in the month. Ratio reports are readily available with both apps, making it that much more simple for centers to ensure all ratios have been adhered to. If an inspector requests a ratio-compliance report, centers can quickly and easily download these reports. Both ChildFriendly and TimeSavr offer detailed incident reports as well.
Winner: Tie
Overall
While both ChildFriendly and TimeSavr offer robust systems that truly cater to childcare providers, specifically Alberta daycare operators, ChildFriendly goes above and beyond in almost every category, providing more options and details for digital storage, an amazing parent communication app, and an enviable finance module to tackle billing and payments. Both systems provide detailed reports across all areas, from safety to emergency info to Alberta-specific compliance reports. If you’re looking for an all-encompassing, all-in-one system that takes care of everything from registration to payments to reports, and daily communication with parents, ChildFriendly stands above the rest.
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