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Kids and Company: Streamlining Childcare Finance with Kindertales Software

  • Writer: Kindertales Collaborative
    Kindertales Collaborative
  • Aug 19
  • 3 min read

This success story details how Kids & Company, a multinational childcare provider, transformed its financial operations by adopting Kindertales childcare software, a modern approach to center management.


About the Co:


Location(s): Over 160 centers across Canada and the US

Care and Services: Infant, Toddler, Preschool, Kindergarten, School Age, Summer Camp, Back-up Care

Mission: To provide a safe, healthy, and high-quality educational environment where children and employees are empowered to grow, learn and thrive.

Kids and Co logo

Challenges


Before adopting Kindertales, Kids & Company, a multinational childcare provider with over 160 centers, faced significant hurdles in managing parent billing and financial reconciliation. Their system relied on manual, intricate Excel spreadsheets, with each center maintaining its own version.


This led to several challenges:


  • Manual updates and human errors: Site directors emailed fee changes monthly, requiring finance staff to manually update files, leading to human errors and reconciliation delays.

  • Problematic Accounts Receivable (AR) process: Aging reports required hours of manual consolidation, and generating outstanding AR listings took days.

  • Time-consuming payment reconciliation: Reconciling payments involved time-consuming VLOOKUPs, bank statement matching, and risky batch processing.

  • Security concerns: The reliance on manual systems and emailed fee changes raised security concerns.

  • High staffing needs for finance: Eight full-time employees were needed to manage finance for approximately 100 locations due to the manual processes.


"Every single site had a master file. We carried forward prior month’s rates and made manual changes. There were constant emails, and we were always double-checking. It was incredibly tedious." — Robert Chung, VP of Finance, Kids & Company

Implementation


Kids & Company implemented Kindertales, a comprehensive childcare management platform, to address their financial management issues. The platform offered an automated billing engine, real-time reporting, and a centralized data system. This allowed them to replace their fragmented, manual processes with a streamlined and scalable solution.


"Kindertales lets us focus on what matters — is our process working? Are we collecting correctly? It takes the guesswork and manual labor out of the equation." — Robert Chung

Results


The implementation of Kindertales yielded significant positive results for Kids & Company:


  • 40% reduction in finance staffing needs: The finance team decreased from 8 to 6 employees, even while the company grew from 100 to over 160 locations.

  • 50% time savings in weekly financial operations.

  • Automated ACH and credit card billing, eliminating the need for manual batch uploads and submissions to processors.

  • Improved AR accuracy and visibility through standardized aging reports and error-proof program fee validation. Generating a company-wide AR report now takes less than an hour, a task that previously took multiple days.

  • Automated tax receipt generation, removing manual effort in compiling, formatting, and distributing annual tax statements.

  • Streamlined subsidy tracking, providing centralized visibility into subsidy allocations and balances, improving accuracy, and reducing follow-up.

  • Enhanced security and transparency in payment processing, with all payment data securely tokenized and processed through PCI-compliant systems. This also reduced NSF issues.

  • Empowered local centers with user-friendly reporting tools, allowing site directors to independently track outstanding balances, NSF occurrences, and enrollment trends, freeing up the head office finance team to focus on strategy.

"Now it takes us less than an hour to generate a company wide AR report, compared to what used to be a multi-day task." — Robert Chung

For large childcare operators looking to modernize their finance operations, the experience of Kids & Company is a compelling case for digital transformation. Kindertales not only saved time and reduced staffing costs, it elevated the entire finance operation to a new level of professionalism, accuracy, and scalability.

Want to start writing your success story with Kindertales? Schedule a demo with our childcare management software experts today!



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