Nurseries are businesses. It’s a drum we beat often, but it’s a fact that makes the difference between community-leading success and struggling to make ends meet.
As such, there are certain tools you need to have available to operate your nursery at its best, whether that’s annually breaking even or growing into something greater, and chief among them is reports.
To run your business well, you have to know your business. And you can do that, with Blossom’s Business Reporting features.
Why do I need Revenue Reports?
Revenue reports are informing you of whether you’re in the red, or the black, and the last thing you need is to only find that out at tax time.
With revenue reports, you can identify where your profit lies. What you do with that profit is up to you, using Blossom’s revenue reports you can identify which age groups or rooms are the most profitable – or perhaps need improvement.
From there, you can scale up your most profitable rooms or groups, or simply ensure that the profits cover the losses. With the funding changes coming in April and September 2024 and September 2025, you’ll want to know if you can afford to have funded places. And Blossom can separate regular from funded income – soon to come in very handy!
If you’ve got more than one setting you can look at a total revenue stream or split it by location. If you’re at an expand or contract phase of your business’ lifecycle, this will really help nail down what to do next.
And of course, you can always use revenue reports to analyse forecast vs actual income, to better understand what can throw your forecasts off.
Use reports to optimise nursery occupancy
Every childcare practitioner has a number of children they are allowed under their wing: the famed ratio. If you’re on site every day and only have one site, it’s moderately easy to check there’s as many children as there can be for the number of staff. Not on site, or have more than one setting? That’s where you need real-time as well as historical reports.
Are there days (Fridays most likely) where there are fewer children than you have capacity for? Are there months where children leave (September, August) or flood in (January, July)? With reports, you can see which months these are for your setting(s) and plan accordingly. This helps keep your income steady – as well as your stress levels.
Unrelated to occupancy but related to children – you can also export reports on emergency contacts, key carers, dietary information, photo permissions and more. Helping you keep on top of everything you need to know to provide best for the children in your care.
Managing nursery enquiries
Managing enquiries is part of ‘customer relationship management’, a standard part of any business with customers and clients. Parents are your clients, and you need to know when they’re coming in and, more importantly, if they’re being dealt with correctly.
Any unanswered enquiries will simply send the parent elsewhere. Similarly, enquiries that are dealt with ineffectively will signal yours isn’t the nursery for them. With Blossom’s enquiry reports, you can see when enquiries are won, lost or open. Simple in-app notifications alert you of new enquiries, so you can lock them in before they browse other competitors.
There are also month-by-month performance reports, offering insight into your incoming enquiries. Through them, you can decide when to focus your efforts on tours, open days and other enquiry-focused activities.
You can also look into which staff members are the best at winning parents over, and so make sure they get new enquiries first!
Maintain a firm grasp of your nursery finances
Unfortunately, not every parent will pay on time – even when you’re using something like Be Paid’s mobile payments to make it as easy as possible. Usually, a gentle reminder is all that’s needed to get things back on track, but it’s useful to know when it doesn’t.
Through Blossom’s reports, you can divide unpaid invoices out into time periods so you can forecast when you’re due to be paid in the next 30 to 120+ days. The fewer of those latter ones you have, the healthier your business is performing.
Blossom can even go beyond 120 days into what is referred to as ‘bad debt’ – fees that are by standard means unrecoverable – and identify the accounts are likely to move there based on previous activity. You can use this insight to plan your reasonable debt collection steps, or cease provision.
Report on nursery funding
Funding can be a tangled web, depending on the openness of your local authority, the number of children in your area that need places, and the fact it’s 38 weeks rather than a calendar year. As such, it’s good to know where you stand.
To explore what funding might cost you, known as your funding gap, take a look at our new Nursery Funding Calculator, developed in partnership with MBK.
Blossom’s business reporting contains a funding report tool, so you can see all of your funding amounts allocated to different children across age groups. While before this was most likely to just be three- and four-year-olds, you’ll know need to know how many two-year-olds you’re provided funded hours to.
Available as a group setting report or individual setting report or per funding allocated per child, this tool should make claiming those hours back just that little bit easier.
Want to explore Blossom’s Business Reporting features? Book a demo and see them all for yourself!
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