Enjoy Childcare can focus on the bigger picture with Enrolmy

Enjoy Childcare runs before and after school care, holiday programmes, and a drop-off service from their four centres in South Wellington –Brooklyn, Mornington, Ōwhiro Bay and Berhampore.

They pride themselves on being a relatively small organisation that can adapt to the changing needs of whānau in their area and play an active role in their community.

What’s more, they do all they can to never turn away a child and are open to whānau who require more support, offering a welcoming, structured and inclusive environment where every kid feels safe to play, relax and try new things.

Starting out in 2015, they used to do all their booking, payment and enrolment processes quite manually. They could cope with that when co-founders Enrino and Josh only had one centre to manage during their early years in business.

But things quickly became complicated when they added three more centres.

Before switching to Enrolmy, during Term Four in 2019, business administrator Seraphina said she could foresee a lot of room for human error, without better systems in place to support their growth.

Seraphina explains how enrolments and bookings would take up a lot of her time. The real struggle was passing that information in a timely manner to all four centres, especially when they would get last-minute notifications from parents through various channels – think email and phone calls. As they have different staff teams in their centres every other day, information could easily get lost.

Plus, Enrino used to spend his Sunday evenings printing off and distributing the paper registers to each centre. If driving between each centre wasn’t an arduous task in itself; to take bookings, parents had to fill out a long website form, which Seraphina would transfer to a spreadsheet, to enable them to create individual copies for each centre.

Now with Enrolmy, parents can quickly and simply make any changes to enrolments themselves and Seraphina doesn’t have to rely on email communications or last-minute phone calls – all the information is in one place through Enrolmy and via the mobile app. Seraphina says that since moving to Enrolmy:

“The enrolment process has changed dramatically – it’s really handy having parents able to step in and control their bookings but it’s also good that I still receive a notification when a change is made. We have additional services that we offer like a drop-off service that we charge for. It relies on me knowing that the child has been booked in for that service, so I know how much to invoice.”

Having all the information handy in digital format means they don’t have to print hard copies of the attendance sheet or rely on centre supervisors to write any notes, which Seraphina explains is an environmental win, as well as making it much easier to reconcile the roll call.

Now, instead of the manual data entry and the back and forth communication between parents and the four centres, Seraphina can spend her time doing more productive, strategic tasks. She says,

“I’m able to dedicate a short, focused amount of time overlooking booking and enrolments and answering and supporting any whānau with their queries, and then I can dedicate a big chunk of my time [to] focusing on the company’s strategies and partnerships with schools.”

The time saved has benefited their whole team, too. Seraphina explains that, because they spend less time doing repetitive or follow up tasks, they can focus more time on implementing better strategies and systems to improve their service and performance. This includes:

“A strong focus on staff development and training [to enable them] to hold their roles as supervisors efficiently.”

Enrolmy also gives Enjoy Childcare quick and easy oversight of the four centres which is important because:

“I can see all the active names and when we’re busiest during the term and [using that information helps us] direct certain strategies. Enrolmy also enables me to monitor which families are active with us and we can do something special to reward loyal families."

On other benefits of switching to Enrolmy, Seraphina says that they are paid faster:

“Before, Enrino would do invoices fortnightly and it took him a few days to do through a manual system. Now I invoice weekly and payments are more frequent.”

Another advantage of the Enrolmy mobile app, which includes a quick sign-in and sign-out feature, is Seraphina can give immediate support to the staff at their four centres without having to check a diary, log into the office emails or listen to voice messages, because all the information is stored in the cloud and can be updated in real-time.

This is a huge health and safety win as she can remotely see when kids have signed in and out – and can follow up quickly if they don’t arrive or get picked up when expected – and staff have allergy information at their fingertips, so they can adjust any food-related activities.

Overall, Seraphina says:

“They have a greater sense of trust when working with an automated system”.

And because of the time and energy saved with Enrolmy, and no longer worrying about whether their records or attendance sheets are up-to-date, they can focus more of their efforts on the big picture stuff. At Enrolmy, we think this is awesome because when they get to focus on what they love and leave the repetitive stuff to us, they can make an even bigger, better impact in their local community.