At Daily Connect, we’re always talking to our users to learn more about the product improvements that would make Daily Connect an even better solution for their day-to-day childcare operations.
We use this feedback to create meaningful new features that save our users time, create a better parent experience, and make life easier.
This month, we’re excited to announce five new features:
- Children and Family Information
- Authorization Levels for Parents and Caregivers
- Weekly Schedules & Absence Tracking
- Attendance Forecasting
- Scheduled Classroom Changes
These changes are all live in the Daily Connect app now and users can begin using them from today.
Curious about how to best use each of these features? Read on for a brief overview of each new tool.
Children and Family Information
These new features make it easy for childcare centers and daycare owners to store all the information they need to have available on children and families in one central location.
Users can now add the following information to a child’s profile:
- Status: Active, Inactive, Removed, or Graduated
- Full Legal Name
- Address
- Medications
- Immunization History
- Registered Pediatrician and other Physicians
These improvements to our record-keeping function help childcare providers better satisfy licensing requirements and other legal requirements put in place by local governments.
What other information would you like to see in this section of Daily Connect? Reach out to the team today at support@dailyconnect.com to share your opinion!
Authorization Levels for Parents and Caregivers
The chances are it’s not the same person picking up the child every day from your care. Multiple people might be involved in a child’s care: Moms, Dads, Aunts, Uncles, Grandparents, Nannies, and more.
When you create multiple caregivers for each child, you can now specify each person’s relation to that child. Additionally, you can assign a level of permission to that individual’s account. The four available levels are:
- View Child Information
- Edit Child Profile
- Authorized Pickup Person
- Emergency Contact
Here are a couple of examples of how this might work in practice.
- A Grandparent can be authorized to view the child information, but cannot edit the child profile or pick up the child from childcare.
- A parent carpools several children from their neighborhood to childcare and needs to be added as an authorized pickup person for another two children, but doesn’t need to be able to view or edit their child information.
You can learn more about this feature here:
Weekly Schedules & Absence Tracking
You can now indicate the planned weekly schedule of a child. You can also easily record no shows and expected absences. This can be helpful to forecast attendance, and also to communicate planned absences with staff.
It’s also possible to keep a record of when the child started childcare and when you expect them to graduate from your care.
You can learn more about these features by visiting these articles:
Attendance Forecasting
With Daily Connect’s new attendance forecasting tools, it’s now possible for your childcare center to predict what attendance will look like in the coming weeks and months. This can help directors make better decisions about staffing levels and generally be better prepared for what the future holds.
The Attendance Forecast Report displays expected attendance. This prediction is calculated using each child’s weekly schedule, their start and end date, any upcoming scheduled absences, and scheduled classroom changes.
To learn more about this feature, read this article:
Scheduled Classroom Changes
Over time, children will move between classrooms as they celebrate birthdays and grow older.
But there’s no need for you to manually have to move a child every time they graduate to the next classroom. You can automate these classroom changes by setting rules based on each child’s age. For example, “When Jacob turns 3, move him from the Orange Classroom to the Apple Classroom”.
Alternatively, you can schedule classroom changes manually ahead of time.
When a change is scheduled, the Daily Connect app will deliver a notification a week before the change to give staff a heads-up about the coming move. On the day the change goes into effect, you don’t have to do anything: the child is automatically moved into their new classroom.
This feature also works with our new Attendance Forecasting feature, helping teachers accurately plan for attendance in every single classroom.
To learn more about Scheduled Classroom Changes, visit this page:
Start Using These New Daily Connect Features Today
All these new features are available to Professional+ subscriptions only. You can upgrade to a Professional+ subscription in the Settings > Billing/Subscription Plan page. If you already have a Premium+ plan, there is no charge to upgrade.
If you have any ideas for new features like these that would make a big difference to how you use Daily Connect in your childcare environment, we’d love to hear them! All of our most popular features come from requests from our users.
To share your thoughts, email the team at support@dailyconnect.com
