The benefits of accepting online payments at your daycare business.

For a daycare center to thrive, it must provide a safe, loving, and stimulating environment for its little charges. That requires expert staff, sufficient supplies, and a supportive parent community. This is all made possible when financial contributions from caregivers come in consistently and reliably. This process can be enhanced when you accept online or over-the-phone payments. Here are just some of the benefits these card-not-present payments can offer your daycare business. 

Minimize tedious tasks.

You already spend your day changing diapers and cleaning up spills. While these jobs are part and parcel of running a daycare center, other drudgeries can become things of the past. For example, there is no need to spend hours printing out paper invoices, stuffing envelopes, and running to the post office when you can simply email or text an invoice to your clients or post a  form on your website. With everything you need to accomplish in a day, you can surely use the time you save on other equally important priorities.

Keep costs down.

Online and over-the-phone payments minimize or eliminate the need for manual payment processing altogether. Also, you won’t have to buy as much paper or stamps, can be more environmentally friendly, and might even be able to free up a staff member to do other tasks once billing becomes electronic.

Experience fewer late payments and conflicts.

When you only let parents pay their bills at your center, you may be less likely to get the bill resolved quickly. Allowing people to take care of their debt from anywhere and at any time through invoicing increases the likelihood of getting your money on time. As a result, your cash flow will improve, and you won’t need to have as many of those awkward and unpleasant conversations about delinquent payments.

Set up recurring billing.

Long employed in the daycare industry, the subscription or recurring model enables you to set up a schedule that makes bill resolution predictable and easy for everyone involved. You simply agree with your client to withdraw a set amount of money from their bank or credit card at regular, predetermined intervals. Of course, you still need to be on the lookout for interruptions stemming from expired cards or closed accounts, but otherwise this arrangement is basically set-it-and-forget-it. In fact, your current system may already have the necessary capabilities. If it doesn’t, most companies that offer payment processing for day care centers will be more than happy to provide you with the software upgrade you will need.

Easier reporting and reconciliation.

Bookkeeping at your center may currently be a living nightmare. Among other things, confusion and mistakes happen when payments are accepted in various ways by multiple people. The resulting data entry errors, lost cash, and scattered receipts can lead to lower revenue, not to mention frustrated clients and staff.

With the right technology in place, when you accept payments online, your system automatically records exactly what was submitted and when the transaction occurred. The customer is immediately provided with an electronic receipt, and the data is automatically transferred into your accounting software for instantaneous reconciliation. Should you need to see how much is still owed to you during a particular time frame or by a certain customer, your point of sale system can produce the information you want in just a few clicks.

Greater security.

Accepting payments manually often means that credit card information is written down and stored by you. This is a serious breach of the data security requirements set forth by the card payment industry in their Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Instead of putting your center at serious financial risk should criminals gain access to these sensitive details, adopting an online payments model passes the burden of card information storage and transmission to a third party. That’s one less risk you need to worry about.

Your daycare center is a haven for the little ones you serve. Taking steps to ensure that caregivers’ payments come in safely and on time helps you to protect the busy learning and play community you have worked so hard to develop and nurture. Streamline your payment processes, and you will be amazed to see how the added security and efficiency will make your entire facility operate more smoothly.