Digitalising a daycare sounds like a big project. In practice it means that the things now written on paper and copied by hand somewhere else are recorded once on a phone and appear straight away wherever they are needed. This article covers where to start and what the move takes.
What paper really costs
A paper list costs nothing, but handling it does. In the morning the children are marked on the list. In the afternoon departure times go in another column. At the end of the month someone adds up the hours for invoicing, and if a row is unclear, they call the unit and ask. When the municipality asks for staff ratio figures, the lists are gone through again.
The same information is recorded three or four times, and every time is a chance for an error. A missing check-out is noticed at invoicing, not the same evening.
A WhatsApp group has its own costs. A message goes to everyone, including those it does not concern. Nobody knows who has read it. Replies get mixed up, and a child’s personal matter ends up in the wrong conversation. When an employee leaves, the group’s history leaves with their phone.
Recorded once
The idea behind one system is simple. Every day, daily life at a daycare produces information: who is present, who is working, what guardians need to be told. It is recorded once, where it happens, and shown to everyone in the right form.
A single check-in on the unit’s phone appears at the same moment in the group’s staff ratio, in the admin view and in the month-end summary. An absence reported by a guardian appears on the unit’s list and lowers the expected number of children for the day. A shift taken by a substitute puts them on the unit’s list for the day. Nothing is copied by hand from one place to another.
Where to start
You do not need to change everything on the same day, but something has to change first. Experience shows it is worth choosing the order by where the most manual work comes from.
Attendance records are a natural starting point, because they are made every day and everything else builds on them. One phone per unit is enough, and each employee opens it with their own PIN code. A record is saved immediately, along with who made it. No special devices are needed: the unit app runs on an ordinary iPhone or Android phone, and admins use a browser.
Once the records are in order, staff ratios follow from them with no extra work. Care times and guardian communication are worth introducing at the same time, because guardians are brought into the app once either way.
What onboarding takes
Daycare management should set aside about two hours for onboarding. During that time children, guardians and staff are brought into the system, each app is walked through, and Knuut is in use the same day. Onboarding is not charged separately.
For staff, the change is smaller than often feared. An employee opens the phone with a PIN code and taps the child’s name. That is about as quick as ticking a box on paper, and from there everything else happens on its own. The director of Kullannuppu daycare described onboarding like this: “Onboarding went smoothly. Knuut is easy to use. Staff picked it up quickly, and so did parents.”
What goes away
In concrete terms, what goes away is the attendance lists on the wall, counting hours at the end of the month, WhatsApp groups with guardians, rounds of calls to substitutes and staff ratio summaries compiled by hand on request.
The owner of Ankkalampi summed up the change: “Work steps dropped out in many places, and that has shown in our costs too.” According to the owner of Vilinätalot, a considerable amount of administrative time was freed up, and more of it now goes to pedagogy and the children.
Privacy is no reason to stay on paper
One common concern is that children’s data is safe on paper and at risk in the cloud. In practice it is the other way round. A paper list on the wall is visible to everyone, and the data in a WhatsApp group sits on every member’s phone without the daycare having any control over it.
In a system, access rights are role-based. A guardian sees only their own child, an employee only their own unit, and a substitute does not see children’s data at all. Every change to a child’s data is logged with who made it and a timestamp. In Knuut, all data about children, guardians and staff is stored within the EU, data transfer is encrypted, and a data processing agreement is signed during onboarding. The daycare is the data controller and Knuut is the processor of personal data.
A trial with no commitment
Every daycare can try Knuut free of charge for a month. Onboarding is done together, and the whole organisation gets to try every app. If Knuut is not right for you, the trial ends at no cost.
Book a demo and we will look at what your unit should move over first.