We’re happy to say that you asked and we listened. We’ve been busy over the summer making lots of changes – big and small – to give you a finance page that suits your nursery’s needs. You should now find Blossom’s system more customisable, more intuitive, and quicker to use. Our main focus has been making it easier to create, edit, and apply funding to bookings.
So, what exactly has changed? Scroll down to check out:
Multiple term dates
If you take children from multiple local authorities with different holiday periods, you can now set up different term date options within one nursery. This will allow you to log each child’s term-time easily and accurately – especially useful for applying term-time funded hours.
Alternating booking patterns
Great for parents who work on shift rotas! You can now set up a child’s booking pattern to change weekly, fortnightly, etc. You will no longer have to add this information manually every time the child’s attendance pattern changes.
Separating regular and one-off bookings
There’s now a clearer split between regular bookings and one-off bookings (plus the sessions, funding, extra items and discounts for both) to make it easier to keep track of children’s attendance patterns.
Packages
We’ve made it simpler to set up and invoice for package deals. Let’s say you give families a discounted price if they book a full week of sessions with three meals a day included – you can now present this option to families as a single purchase with a fixed cost, rather than adding up the price of each day and meal.
Future price changes
You can now set up future price changes on Blossom. The system will take this into account automatically when creating future invoices, meaning you don’t have to wait to do it on the exact day the price change comes into effect.
Insider tip!
You can use this to generate more accurate financial forecasts as well as more accurate reports on past income.
Closure day charges
Nurseries will now have complete flexibility over how they charge on closure days – you can choose to charge only on some types of closure days but not others, eg. over national holidays but not over school holidays.
Hourly consumable prices
Consumables can now be invoiced per hour or per session, meaning you can increase or decrease your consumable charges depending on how long the child is in the nursery.
Insider tip!
You can also now add consumables to one-off extra sessions, to help make sure your books are balanced.
Easier funding allocation
Funded hours will now be automatically allocated to save you time.
Insider tip!
You can still change the allocation manually if you want to.
One-off funding
You can now log one-off funding amounts, such as grants from the local authority, making it easier to keep track of income and outgoings.
Discounts on set dates
You can now set up a discount to be applied from a certain date and then removed at a certain date, instead of having to remove the discount manually when it comes to an end.
Insider tip!
You can do this for either a fixed amount or a percentage of the total price.
Applying funding and discounts together
Blossom customers now have the flexibility to choose whether they apply funding before or after a discount (in cases where families are getting both), as this may affect the total invoice amount.
This update is a major one, and it’s been a long time coming. Now that it’s complete, we’re looking forward to being able to move full speed ahead with our other projects! As always, Blossom wants to hear from you to understand what we could do to make life easier for our clients. We are constantly working on updating and improving our site based on your feedback. Stay tuned for more soon…
