The Blossom Business Package is great for focusing on your performance and increase business profitability.
Here you’ll find all of those features listed and expanded, along with links to their full feature pages.
Everything in Blossom's Business Package:
Invoicing and Funding
Bespoke Invoice Settings
To run your business your way, you need to be able to invoice your way. On Blossom’s Business package and above, you can change invoicing schedules, sequence numbering and more to make your invoices work best for you.
Generate & Send Invoices
As part of a robust nursery finance system, you can generate and send invoices for any time frame for any child or group of children you desire.
Batch invoice in seconds
As part of the above, you can group your generated invoices by Room or any manually selected collection of children until you’ve built the batch you desire. Then with one button press, your invoices are requested and marked as outstanding against the relevant children.
Create Funding Grants
Childcare funding is ever-increasing in complexity. Through Blossom’s latest finance system, you can create any number of funding types to apply to the children who qualify, and see those hours or days automatically subtracted from invoices.
Financial Reporting and Forecasting
Running a business effectively means having a good eye on your finances both historic and projected. With 7 different reports, you can get all the insight you need into your nursery’s finances with clear presentation, meaning keeping track and forecasting is easier than ever.
Monitor Transactions and Payments
Deposits, refunds, invoiced fees, outstanding payments: all of these are key to good financial management, and with Blossom’s easy-to-read reports you can see everything you’ve got in the books versus everything you’re due in the books.
We’ve even included a detailed debtors report, so you know which payments have been too long overdue and you can plan and act accordingly.
Maintain Detailed Accounts
Within every child’s profile and the Blossom platform Finance section, you can analyse everything to do with payments and ensure not only do you stay in the black, but always understand why.
Occupancy Planning
Weekly Occupancy Reports
Occupancy is at the heart of nursery business success, outside of what you charge parents for your practitioner’s time. With Blossom’s Weekly Occupancy Reports, you can see how many children were due versus your capacity, and how many attended or were absent for morning and afternoon sessions, with a simple colour-coded system to help you identify occupancy shortfalls and patterns.
This also highlights your chosen ratios and informs you how many staff you need for a given session or day.
FTE Percentages
Included in the above is Full-Time Earning (FTE) Percentages, calculated based on children’s session sets without factoring in extra sessions, holidays and absences.
The closer you are to 100%, the healthier your accounts will look at month-end and the better you’re maximising your occupancy.
Monthly & Yearly Occupancy Forecasts
It always pays to plan ahead. On Blossom you can forecast on a monthly and yearly basis based on the current state of occupancy, historical data and projected leavers.
Nursery Spaces Planner
Easily access your available spaces and make changes accordingly, with a colour-coded system helping to highlight bottlenecks and a date filter meaning you can fast forward to the future. Great for working out where room moves might need to occur or staff sent home/brought in.
Automatic & Suggested Room Moves
When a child reaches a certain age, you might want to immediately move them to another room. On the other hand, if they’re not developmentally ready yet you might need to hold them back, depending on how you like your rooms to work.
Blossom can work with either system – just let us know during your onboarding and we’ll help you set it up!
Staffing and HR
Staff Profiles
At a glance, enjoy complete visibility over your team, their qualifications and leave taken. This includes uploaded contracts, payroll number, contact details as well as a bio that parents can view. Only Managers, Administrators and the staff member themselves can see or edit these.
Staff Worklog
Simplify payroll and shift allocation with easy access to all staff worklogs. Keep track of staff’s worklogs including shifts, breaks & absences, add additional information about sickness or holidays, automatically calculate total work hours per week and export your data based on your planned and/or actual work hours.
Staff Rota
Understand exactly where you need to allocate staff on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Input shifts, share rotas, highlight under- and over-staffed sessions, check against ratios – everything you need from your daily staff operations, you’ll find on Blossom.
Staff Leave
Control and flexibility over staff leave allocation. Track & log staff sickness, book & keep a record of staff holidays, see an instant overview of the full teams leave, and even add custom leave types to generate more accurate exported reports.
Staff Register
Clock in and clock out with a simple PIN system, and stay current on where all staff are assigned within the setting at all times, including monitoring break times and setting up non-teaching rooms for accurate ratio reporting.
Accounting Integrations
Sage 50 and Xero
Accounting software for small businesses with in-house bookkeepers. Should you already be using one of these accounting systems, Blossom can export files that work directly with their systems, simplifying and removing admin required to line up columns and spreadsheets.
Enquiry Management
Build a custom pipeline of prospects
Like a mini CRM, Blossom’s enquiries feature lets you treat enquiries like other businesses treat their potential customers. Build a pipeline of enquiries however you like to treat them, with a base journey of Enquired, moving to Won or Lost.
Log activities
Keep an eye on your parental enquiries by logging the communication activities you share with them. Emails, phone calls, viewings and notes – put them all in your platform and even if the team member who’s running the enquiry is absent, someone else can pick up the slack to keep the enquiry warm and interested.
Manage all your enquiries and registrations in one place
In one easy-to-find area, you can see every enquiry that’s waiting in the wings – you can even enrol children straight from here!
Correctly managing your enquiries is key to a steady income pipeline and making your business grow. That’s why it’s on Blossom!
Parent Requested Care - Extra Sessions
Available through the Parent App, if parents want to request extra sessions they can do so with a few button taps. These get sent straight to your Blossom platform for you to accept and reject as you wish, leading you towards maximising your occupancy and your best chance at profit.
You’ll even receive alerts if it will leave you understaffed for you ratios, and the extra sessions will be immediately applied to booking sessions, the register and invoices.
Observations
EYFS & CoEL Frameworks
Early Years Foundation stage and Characteristics of Early Learning are just two of the frameworks you can link children’s observations to on Blossom. Choose your framework(s) when onboarding with Blossom, and they’ll always be available when you need to demonstrate a child’s developing, starting or mastered skill.
Montessori Frameworks
Blossom’s five nurseries follow the Montessori framework, so it would be remiss of us not to include it as an available developmental framework. As above, simply attach observations to Montessori framework areas to help with our automated formative reports.
Formative reports
Monitor child learning over a specific time period and create a report for ongoing child and parent feedback. This can also be used for school starters, giving parents insight into where there child is when leaving nursery or ending a year.
Document storage
Save contracts, scanned paper forms, and any documents your setting might be creating or have created outside the Blossom software. There’s a limit to the file size, but your likelihood of hitting it is slim!
Once you’ve uploaded files you can rename and delete them as you wish.
Custom auto-logout times
From the Blossom Learning package and above, you can set an auto-logout to a time of your choosing. This prevents anyone accidentally giving access to those they shouldn’t by leaving an authorised device logged in while unattended.
By default, Blossom has no auto-logging-out unless the feature is switched on.
Priority phone & Email support
While Blossom will always respond to your messages and phone calls, if there’s a queue then those with Learning packages and above are prioritised.
We take great pride in our Customer Service team here at Blossom – every one of them has spent time in a childcare setting and has extensive knowledge of your common day-to-day operational needs and the Blossom platform.
Tracking and reporting
Observation Tracker
With Blossom’s Observation Tracker, you can see all observations made by staff and quickly spot children falling behind. From this area, you can also share observations with parents if they’re not on the parent app already.
Progress Tracker
A key part of the childcare world is development – hitting milestones, emerging skills and more, with a view to keeping an eye on the children ahead, behind and right on track.
With Blossom, you can easily log and report on those developing and developed skills linked to your selected framework, whether child by child or across the whole cohort.
Comparison Reports
Keep an eye on child progress and practitioner observations, generating Ofsted-compliant comparison reports whenever the need arises.
Using these Blossom tools it becomes child’s play to compare children and identify those who are flying or falling behind.
Group Filters
Most if not all Blossom reports can be filtered by Rooms, Age groups and other groupings to help you really drill down into your operational data.
Operational Reports
Detailed Dietary Reports
Whenever you need to, download and export to a Manager’s or Administrator’s inbox information on children’s dietary requirements and allergy information.
Use it to plan your menus and food stocks.
Emergency Contacts List
Build a snow pyramid, create backups or simply spread emergency information there and then. Export an emergency contact list and you’ll know who to reach for every child all at once, and identify gaps if any exist.
Starters & Leavers Reports
All part of occupancy forecasting and planning, you can automatically populate reports for your chosen timeframes of children leaving and expected to arrive.
Should you need to, you can export this information too.
Key Person Lists
It’s important to keep an eye on children’s Key Persons, to make sure no one practitioner is overloaded and there are none with no children.
To that end, Blossom has an easily accessible list for Managers and Administrators to use, analyse and export if desired.
Children's profiles
Customisable BlossomBoard ®
Your BlossomBoard is your Blossom homepage, the first thing you’re greeted with every time you log in. Make it your way and customise it with the reports and views you want to see.
From the first click, Blossom is all yours.
Child Profiles
It’s important that nursery children’s key carers know their child, especially if that key carer changes over time. Using Blossom’s child profiles, all relevant information (like allergies, main contacts, likes and dislikes) are all stored and available only to those who need it.
Data is stored safely and securely – only your nursery staff who are given access to profiles can access them.
Daily Allergy Updates
Each day, staff get a report on their dashboard to show the children due in that day, and any allergies they may have. That way, everyone knows at any given moment what allergies to be mindful of.
Emergency Contacts
If anything comes up with a child during the nursery day, you need to be able to reach those who need to know about it. Store emergency contacts in your Blossom platform and staff who need to can access contact details with speed and ease.
Passwords for Collection
In some circumstances, you might want to add extra security to pickups, perhaps in places where your parents keep holding the door open for others when they shouldn’t.
Add an extra layer by requesting parents to provide a password on pickup, which you can store on your Blossom platform.
Digital register
One-tap registers
Couldn’t be more straightforward – child arrives, tap them in on Blossom. Child leaves, tap them out on Blossom. Simple!
Using this feature effectively means at any point in the day, managers and owners can log in and see every child on-site without a walkaround headcount.
Absence and Holiday reporting
At any time you can run a report on the children present against the children expected, noting absences and logged child holidays for staff planning purposes and invoicing too.
Newsfeed and Diaries
Newsletters to Parents
Sometimes you want to speak to all parents at once. Perhaps it’s a reminder to supply sun hats when the weather’s good, a reminder of an upcoming family picnic or positive news following an inspection.
With Blossom, it couldn’t be easier. Send out newsletters by email or the Parent App (or both!) and get your message out to everyone in an instant.
Customisable Menus
The nursery menu is a changeable thing, with every setting doing things their own way. And Blossom is here to celebrate that. Set up your meal and menu items your way, and then easily pick them from a list when recording children’s meal times
Activities, Nappies, Sleeps & Meals
Many parents have been tracking nappies, sleeps and feeds since day dot. When letting their child go to nursery, many will expect that level of child activity to know their hard-fought routines are still being used.
Each one is easy to log in Blossom with a handful of taps. It even extends to potty training!
Accidents and Incidents
Log Accidents and Incidents
Part of every settings’ compliance, you need to log accidents (when one child is hurt) and incidents (multiple children injured) so parents are informed and you can keep a check on the number of accidents and incidents happening on site.
We’ve recently revamped Blossom’s Accidents and Incidents to make it easier than ever, with much-requested body maps and common injuries now included.
Digital signatures
Another part of safeguarding compliance, you can collect parent signatures (and those of reporters/managers) within Blossom, so when asked you can prove to inspectors that every accident and incident is logged, accounted for and has been reported to everyone necessary
Administration and Security
Multiple Roles & Permissions
Blossom comes with a series of staff roles and permissions built in. These can be at a group level as well as individual settings, giving access to multiple settings or just one as required.
Parental Permissions
Parent permissions can be given and removed at any time, limiting who has access to children’s data to only those you and the guardian permit.
Access Logs
In line with your safeguarding responsibilities, it’s important to know who’s logged into your Blossom platform. Within Blossom’s settings, you can easily see login and log-out times for every person with access to your platform.
Authorised Devices
Only authorised devices can access your Blossom platform, which you can set up during initial onboarding as well as add afterwards if you’re a Manager or Admin.
Prevent anyone from taking access or data home by only authorising devices you have control of and remain on site.
Custom Data Migration
All part of your onboarding process – if you have an existing system in place before moving over to Blossom, we’ll help and make sure everything you had stored gets safely placed on your new Blossom platform.
Two-way messenger
Instant parent notifications via parent app
Every time you log a meal, nappy, bottle or ‘Golden Moment’ observation, you can send it straight to the guardians logged against that child in Blossom.
If they’ve got notifications turned on, they’ll know about it in an instant!
Let parents communicate quickly to the nursery
With the Blossom Parent App, parents have access to an instant messenger tied to their child’s key person and the nursery admins. Through it they can send messages straight to the relevant people at the nursery, whether that’s feedback on observations, updates on holiday bookings or pickup time, or whatever might come up!
Permission & role based
Not everyone at the nursery needs to see every message, and that’s why access is limited to those assigned to certain rooms, children or permission levels.
Safe & secure
Messages are locked within the Blossom platform and Parent App. Manage control with your authorised devices mentioned above.
End-to-end encryption
Just like the best messenger apps out there, at Blossom we encrypt data when it’s sent from either party (nursery or parent), and it can only be decrypted by Blossom software. Outside of the platform and app, no-one can see messages but you!
The Blossom Parent App
The pride of Blossom and loved by parents, every Blossom package comes parcelled with the Parent App and linked directly to your setting.
Through the App, parents can:
- View their child’s schedule
- See diary updates logged by the nursery
- View formative reports created by the setting,
- Share golden moments (fabulous observations) in either direction
- Home observations
- Share billing information
- Check child information
- Try home activities,
- Receive push notifications
- Receive newsletters published by the nursery
- Download and share photos
- Request extra sessions
Book your Blossom Business package demo today
