Childcare center uses WebLink to reduce the time and expense
of registering families

Clayton Child Care has been in service for over 35 years. During the last school year, Clayton served over 2,000 children daily, representing over 1,500 families. They work to give children the essential skills they need in order to succeed and prosper throughout their lives.

Business Challenge

Larry Robbins, Client Service Manager, has been with Clayton for over 6 years. During his tenure, it became clear to him that they needed a better solution to manage their parent/child data and meet their essential multi-site reporting needs. It was also important that the system could grow and be customized to their specific situation. In addition, they needed a way to reduce the administrative burden on client services such as manually handling registrations. Finally, they wanted a way to shorten their fee collection time frame. The goal was to move the "money and client service functions to a centralized (headquarters) environment, leaving our childcare providers with their primary function, the caring for our young clients."

Solution

Clayton Child Care turned to EZ-CARE2 childcare management software, WebLink online forms, and Click-to-Pay to address all of their needs. As Larry explained, "The main option, other than a ready-made system, was to create one ourselves. As a nonprofit, that would have been an impractical financial business decision. So we opted for a system that met most of our needs, could be customized to our situation, and could grow with us as our needs changed. EZ-CARE2 was the answer to our unique situation (especially with multiple sites within the school districts) and EZ-CARE2 was customized to our needs while maintaining all the advantages of the core system."

Key Results

According to Larry, "The results have been fantastic. First, the application/registration process has improved tremendously, and it's become a breeze because of WebLink. Instead of having client service reps spend their time putting applications into EZ-CARE2 manually, parents enter the data online themselves and WebLink uploads it automatically into EZ-CARE2. Previously, it took our Client Service representatives 6 to 8 minutes to process/enter an application manually into the system. With WebLink, we now do hundreds in the same 6 to 8 minutes!"

Childcare center uses WebLink to reduce the time and expense
of registering families

Key Results continued

Larry noted how much time they've saved during the registration period because of EZ-CARE2 and WebLink. "The 3 to 4 week registration period has seen staff overtime, and additional help needed from parents, drop by more than half over the previous years when we did manual processing. This has solved our problem. Plus, the online registration process also makes it possible to have copies of 'legible' documents at the center, each one containing vital information on the children in our care. We've also seen that our early registrations are up 30% due to the online capability."

Larry concluded, "With WebLink, the child care providers do not have to waste any more time on these applications and can focus strictly on improving the quality of the work they do with children."

As for Click-to-Pay, Larry noted "the process saves about 5 hours a week per rep (3) of time spent on collections, and as a byproduct, our collection rate is better. Costs related to mailing collection letters (200 - 300 per week) are now negligible. It has cut our collections and positively affected our cash flow. We do not have to mail out as many payment reminders since we began using Click-to-Pay."