Childcare online Booking System

Annual and Residential Payments

In September of 2016 we have expanded our Childcare online Booking System (CoB) to include the ability for administrators to take payments for annual and residential trips. An annual or residential trip are times when your club or school needs to collect scheduled payments from parents, which would have had previously been managed manually at the cost of a lot of work and administration. It need not even fit the description of an trip but is flexible for anytime you need to collect payments in this manner. The new enhancement to the system allows you to setup the trip / event / payments, define which children should be included, define the schedule of payments and publish. The system includes automated, but customisable, e-mail reminders to parents that allow them to book in without login information to make the payment.

This new area of the system is separate from the standard before, after and holiday club bookings although parents use the same account and details to make payments. It allows the flexibility for a whole range of different situations that would have previously not be covered by the CoB system.

Process

Administrators setup a new payment scheme in the following way:

  1. Define Trip Information - On this screen will contain all the information about the trip (title, details and date if applicable), which you wish for parents to see. You will also define:
    • Whether the payment is mandatory
    • Totals Cost and discounts for staff or children from your school
    • If and when reminder e-mails shoudl be sent out
    • The applicable schools
    • The applicable year groups
    • Payment type exclusions 0 I.e. if payments cannot be made via Childcare Voucher
  2. Payment Schedule - You can then define one or more payments each with a date and amount due at that time
  3. Publish - Once all payments are defined you are shown a list of all children currently registered who match that criteria. You will be able to unselect children who are not applicable before publishing to parents
  4. Parents View - Parents see the upcoming payments on their dashboard and can choose to pay at any time. They also see a complete overview of any trips showing which payments have already been made. If they have not done so, they will be included on reminder e-mails
  5. Summary - At all times you can see which children have had payments for the trip. You can also add extra children onto the list at any time should you have any newly registered accounts or people joining your club / school.

Conclusion

We firmly believe the new Annual and Residential functionality adds significant value to the CoB system. This is one of many updates we have rolled out, at no cost to CoB clients. This represents ongoing investment and development to our CoB system to be the best possible and allow schools and clubs to manage bookings and take payments. If you wish to speak with us about the new functionality or anything else related to childcare system please call for an informal chat.

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