Childcare management software runs a crèche, day-care centre or preschool from day to day. It records which children arrive and leave, collects fees, and sends parents daily reports, photos and messages. It is also called preschool management software or a day-care app. Parents use it as an app on their phones, and teachers use it on a tablet in the classroom.
Parents of very young children want to know what happened during the day: whether the child ate lunch, how long the child slept, and who picked the child up. Before such software, a teacher wrote this in a diary that went home in the child's bag. Now the teacher taps it into the app, and the parent sees it within minutes.
Here is a typical case. A day-care centre in Gurugram looks after 45 children aged one to five, from 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. At 8:42 a.m., a father drops off his three-year-old daughter. The teacher marks her check-in on the tablet, and her mother, who has already left for work, gets a notification. At 1 p.m., the teacher records that the girl ate most of her lunch. Later she records that the girl slept from 1:15 to 2:30. At 3 p.m., she posts a photo of the class painting with leaves. In the evening, the girl's grandmother arrives to collect her. The parents have added the grandmother in the app as an approved pick-up person, with her photo. So the teacher checks her face against the photo before handing the child over.
Fees are the second job. The centre charges ₹14,000 a month. On the 1st, the software sends every family a fee reminder with a payment link. The link opens a payment gateway, where parents pay by UPI or card. The software marks each fee as paid, and on the 7th it reminds the families who have not paid yet.
Messages to parents are sent through notification infrastructure. The app gives one instruction, and this infrastructure delivers it as a push notification, an SMS or a WhatsApp message. Messages that a business sends to people in this way are called A2P messaging.
Photos of children are sensitive. Under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, a business needs a parent's verifiable consent before it handles a child's personal data. So the centre must ask each family whether their child may appear in photos that other parents see.
Childcare software is different from a student information system (SIS). An SIS keeps marks, timetables and transcripts over years of study. Childcare software is built around one day at a time: arrival, meals, sleep, photos and pick-up.