How accepting diverse payments can help drive the quality of your daycare.

As many daycare providers know, giving love and social enrichment to their small charges must be at the top of the priority list. What may not seem so obvious, however, is the importance of integrating all services into a POS system equipped with software that allows for payment processing for daycares. Believe it or not, furnishing parents with a wide variety of choices when it comes to resolving their bill will benefit your child-care business in numerous ways.

Multiple methods to pay.

Of course, your clients can still provide you with the funds they owe in the traditional way, i.e., handing over a check or cash when they come to pick up their child at the end of the week. However, there are numerous other options as well that include the following.

• Android and iPhone applications. Like most of us, parents tend to keep their cellphones on their person at all times. That makes it all the easier to facilitate payments through the use of a simple yet secure app. This system should allow parents to make automatic monthly payments in a set-it-and-forget-it way that guarantees you get the money to which you are entitled while removing the worry of late payments for your clients. Combined with this capability, parents should be able to access a dashboard that will show their payment status at a quick glance. From your end, the app should allow for a fast turn-around when it comes to processing funds as well as simplicity in the mobile payments process.
• Paying via your website. When you begin to accept online payments, you will immediately provide parents with an easy solution that they can access from almost anywhere. Of course, accepting funds in this way requires that you have a partnership with a merchant account provider that can furnish you with all of the software and hardware you need. That includes a secure gateway with shopping cart software that authenticates the payment and communicates with the parents’ acquiring bank to ensure that there are sufficient funds in the account.
• Recurring billing. The recurring billing model has long been a preferred method of payment processing for daycares. In order to set up this arrangement, you and your client agree that a set amount of money is to be withdrawn from their bank account or credit card on a certain date. Most daycare providers opt to simply have the cost for one month taken out of the customer’s account or card. Once recurring billing is in place, you will have far fewer awkward conversations about late or missing payments, resulting in a better overall relationship with your clients.
• Digital payments. If your POS system is set up to allow it, you can also begin to accept funds via Apple Pay and Google Pay. The parent needs only to have set up their digital wallet by entering credit card and/or bank account details, which are then stored securely. When the time comes to make a payment, the caregiver simply taps or waves their phone or watch near your contactless terminal. Behind the scenes, the customer’s details are encrypted and tokenized and then sent to the other players in the process for approval. The entire transaction usually takes three seconds or less.

No one enjoys giving up their money even if it is for the best of reasons. However, broadening the choices you provide can make the inevitable proceed a lot faster and more conveniently.

Benefits of digital payments for daycares.

There are a few reasons why childcare centers are just some of the many businesses that are embracing digital payments. 

• Easy tracking. Both you and your clients can monitor monthly childcare payments from a single, easy-to-use source. This allows everyone involved to feel more in control of the finances involved.
• Automated payments free everyone. You get the money you are owed on a regular, predictable basis. That makes it easier to project income and spend accordingly. Clients no longer need to remember to send in a payment. In the end, everyone can spend more time focusing on what is most important: the children.
• No more need to accept cash and checks. Cash is untraceable, and leaving large amounts of it lying around makes you vulnerable to crime. Checks can bounce. By contrast, digital solutions are secure and are recorded electronically as they happen, making it a simple matter to retrieve the details at a later date if necessary.

All of these advantages underscore the streamlined security and transparency that digital payments can bring to your daycare center.

There will always be that old-school parent who insists on handing you a wad of bills once a week, and there is sure to be an occasional outlier who insists on giving you a check. However, the more you focus on the various digital payment options, the more secure and efficient your business will be. In the end, bill-paying will be transformed from a nightmare into a slightly annoying inevitability.