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If you’re suffering from slow payments, late payments and non-payments, the chances are your current invoice and payments system isn’t working as well as it could be. If this is the case, it could be time to develop a new structure. Change is always challenging, for everyone involved, so here’s how to implement things smoothly and keep everyone’s good will.

Your child care business provides an important community service. We all remember the panic when ABC Learning went into administration, as parents – many of them working full time – desperately needed to secure continued child care. Because of this, if your child care centre is struggling due to certain circumstances, there may be government help available. The Federal Government offers information and support to child care services, and this includes grants and financial assistance.

Avoiding late payments and bad debt in the first place is far better than getting stuck in a difficult situation. Creating a culture of prompt payment at your child care service will help avoid some of the issues. Bear in mind that you may be one of the lowest priorities for a family struggling financially, despite the important role you play in their life. After all, how can they go to work and earn an income if they don’t have child care? But the reality is that families tend to expect more time and understanding from a business such as a child care provider than from a bank or electricity provider.

Are you opening a new child care service? Have you thought about the Child Care Benefit (CCB) and Child Care Rebate (CCR)? Currently all parents are entitled to CCR, this can be paid directly to the parent instead of the service (as can CCB however not many parents request lump sum payments of CCB).  These schemes are definitely something every child care service should be a part of. In this blog I’ll explain what the benefits of being an approved CCB service are, what you need to do to become eligible and what other government funding opportunities are available to you.

Child care is an intensely customer-facing business and one built on trust. You are looking after people’s children, and you have extensive face-to-face contact with parents. This makes it all the more challenging when parents don’t pay. You still have to greet them each day in a friendly way, and discuss their child’s progress, while knowing that behind the scenes you’re having to escalate measures against them. No one wants to get to the stage of having bad debtors. You should of course do everything you can to avoid it. But at some point, you may have to call in your debts in a more formal way.

In a national strategic review the Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA) revealed that some registered training organisations (RTOs) offering early childhood education and care training are producing ‘graduates’ in 25 weeks. This is half the minimum length of time recommended in the Australian Qualifications Framework. Not only does this create a potentially unsafe environment for the children in their care, it leaves the ‘graduates’ heavily under-qualified and inexperienced, undermines other RTOs that are offering high-quality courses and places child care services in a compromising position for when they are hiring a child care worker. Child care training is competency-based training and certificate III courses should take one to two years to complete, not 25 weeks.

You’ve established that you have a slow payment problem at your child care service. While most of your parents pay eventually, a number of them pay so late that you’re struggling to pay your own bills. It feels like you’re always a step behind: you have just enough to pay your staff, then everything else has to wait until the fees finally trickle in. So how can you try and get paid faster? 

At the time of writing this blog, there are 27 registered Child Care Management System software providers in Australia. For a child care director who is either starting a new service or has existing CCMS software and is thinking about switching to another provider, there’s A LOT to choose from. Coupled with the fact that all of the CCMS software providers structure their offerings differently from each other, it can be hard to compare providers. All registered providers meet the minimum standard set by the Department of Social Services to submit information to make claims against Child Care Benefits, Child Care Rebate, Inclusion Support etc. So which one do you choose and how do you know which one suits your child care business best? This blog post outlines four steps that can help you easily compare your top choices and come out the other end with a clear winner.

With your child care service running on tight margins, you can’t afford to let payments lapse and come in weeks or months late. It’s very important that parents realise this, so you need to create a policy for slow payers.

All child care services in Australia are required by the National Quality Standard (NQS) to work towards continuous improvement. This is so kids can experience the best conditions in their early educational and developmental years. Continuous improvement should be, as the title suggest, ongoing. Even if your service has been assessed as exceeding, it’s always a good idea to regularly look back on your practices and processes to see what else can be improved just that little bit more.