In today’s world, we’re busier than ever before. Childcare owners/operators, like you, and both your enroled and enquiring families are looking for ways to streamline processes to make things easier. Unfortunately, there are 5 common mistakes that you may still be making during the enrolment process.
We recently hosted a webinar addressing these issues, the future of enrolment, and how you can quickly streamline your enrolment process. Watch the recording and read more below to determine if you're making any of these mistakes at your own centre.
1. Incomplete & Illegible Data
Typically, a parent is handed a hefty paper packet that includes all the necessary questions a centre must ask to keep track and take care of an enroled child. When parents fill this type of information out on paper, it’s very easy for fields to be left blank, either because the parent may be resistant to answer or simply due to human error.
Everyone’s handwriting is unique; this means that what is considered legible to one person is not necessarily easy to read for anyone else. In the traditional enrolment process, after parents fill out the paper forms, the natural next step is for a staff member to manually enter the entirety of the packet’s contents into your management system. Even if your paper enrolment packet is only 10 pages long, and you only have 10 new children enroling each month, you’re still depending on your staff to manually enter 100 pages of information and decipher 10 different kinds of handwriting. According to Ugerboek Software, the average manual data entry error rate for humans is 1 percent, meaning that 1 out of every 100 entries is inaccurate.
2. Insecure & Vulnerable Data
Paper can be an incredibly vulnerable method of information collection and storage. Paper forms can be easily accessed, stolen, misplaced, or even destroyed. In cases of fire or flood, education systems that rely on paper files are left without a backup plan and the data is simply gone.
To give you an idea of how much time and money searching for misplaced paper documents can cost an organisation, the average office spends about 8 hours performing paper management. According to the National Association of Professional Organizers, businesses with 100 employees waste approximately $4,800 per week due to the inability to locate and deliver needed information.
3. Lack of Follow Up
With no way to synchronise the collection of data from paper forms into your CRM or management system, the follow-up process can become strenuous and time-consuming. This often leads to a lack of follow-up after a parent has enroled or waitlisted. Unfortunately, if you aren’t communicating and engaging with these families, you are unlikely to stay top of mind and you may lose the chance to provide care for their child(ren).
4. Inconvenient for Parents & Providers
When a parent is enroling for care, they first must request your forms via phone, email, snail mail, or in-person. If your centre is more tech-focused, maybe you offer your forms on your website so families can print them out at their convenience. But even this method requires several steps for submitting the forms back to your centre. Once families have collected and completed all these forms, they must either mail them in, fax them to you, or drop them off.
While filling out lengthy state forms in addition to your custom enrolment packet, parents may be prompted to fill out the same information multiple times. This can lead to delayed enrolment and incomplete forms or even, in some cases, annoyed parents.
5. Wasted Time on Data Entry
Following your organisation’s receipt of their forms, your staff must then spend time manually entering data into your management system or wherever you store enroled children’s records. Manual data entry, although traditional, is quickly becoming eradicated with the ability to integrate software platforms (and for good reason)… Did you know that businesses that utilise software integrations primarily for data entry processes save an average of 3.8 hours a day? That’s over 8 weeks a year!
