When I go to value a setting, I ask for quite a bit of information, and this may be presented to me in a variety of ways.
The common thread is that most, if not all, nurseries now use some kind of software that should be helping them collate this data in an easy way. Often the accountant has asked the nursery to put it in place and asked them to do the bare minimum in order to get the information to the accountant.
For management systems it may be that one part of the software is used religiously and that is the reason it was brought in-house, with all other functions being managed outside of the system.
This can be problematic. If you are someone who uses the management system for booking sessions, but not for invoicing, it means you now have two systems that really need to talk to each other, or at least have checks in place to make sure they tally.
I know of one setting which did not log its funded payments received on its management system. These were paid into the bank account, so the money was received and on the system while those hours were logged as no charge. That was fine except when the setting was sold, the system reports were used as proof of income and the setting was initially undervalued because a chunk of income had been forgotten.
I suspect that there are two reasons why people don’t fully utilise the systems they already have, and pay significantly for. This tends to be either they don’t know what that system can actually do, or they feel that to properly utilise it they will need to have loads of data to input and time to do so.
My advice here is that you should start by pressing buttons. Work through the reports part of your system and see what info you can be getting. What would be really useful to have and what are you already doing elsewhere? If it doesn’t give you all the information you need or more in one place, I would be shocked. But, if you feel it is missing something, contact the supplier.
