Daycare Software
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Daycare Software · Independent daycare centers, church daycares, preschool/daycare hybrids · Early access · 2026

Run your daycare. Prove compliance. Protect every child’s consent.

Daycare Software is an operating platform for the independent owner-director: custody-safe check-in, real-time ratio monitoring, consent-gated media, and SC licensing compliance in one place. The Custody-Safe Consent Ledger runs under everything — built for divorced households, foster placements, restraining orders, and mid-enrollment custody changes, not just for a single enrollment signature. Built on the same check-in, billing, and consent substrate as the school platform. Early access — no pricing commitment, no signup, no live payments today.

Book a conversation How it works
Custody-awaredivorced households, foster placements, restraining orders — enforced at the check-in screen, not on a clipboard
Fail-closedunauthorized pickup cannot check out a child; unconsented child does not appear in any photo share
Inspection-readySC licensing checklist, incident logs, immunisation expiration alerts, staff certification tracking
Your dataowned by your organisation; never sold; one-click export available in writing if you leave

The Custody-Safe Consent Ledger — built for the situations a paper form cannot handle

A custody change at noon takes effect at noon — not at the next enrollment renewal

A daycare center serves families in every configuration: two-parent, divorced with a parenting plan, grandparent-as-guardian, foster care, kinship placement, a parent with a restraining order who shows up at the door. A paper enrollment form with one guardian signature is not a consent model for any of those situations. It is a document the director is supposed to remember to check when something goes wrong.

The Custody-Safe Consent Ledger is a live, engine-enforced record. A custody restriction takes effect the moment a director records it — the check-in engine enforces it at the door before a non-authorised adult reaches the classroom. A restraining order flag surfaces as a director alert, not a note on the front desk. A temporary foster placement’s consent windows expire on the configured date without the director needing to remember to revoke them. A multi-child classroom photo is checked against every depicted child’s consent record before it can be shared — if even one child is unconsented, the group-photo conflict resolver holds the photo fail-closed and produces a remediation plan (blur or crop the unconsented child, or split it into a consented-only view) rather than sending the image to the other twenty-nine families as-is.

The Custody-Safe Consent Ledger is built and production-ready. It runs under check-in, media sharing, compliance, billing, and data export from the first day of enrollment.

Book a conversation Full platform

How it works

The daycare operating year in four stages

Daycare Software runs on an operating rhythm: custody intake before the first day, daily check-in and ratio monitoring, compliance and billing mid-year, and a clean year-end with a full data export. Every stage is described as it is built today.

Step 1 · Enrollment — custody intake before the first day

A family completes enrollment with the Custody-Safe Consent Ledger as the first step. Authorised guardians are listed with their specific pickup permissions and any custody restrictions or court-order flags; photo and video consent is recorded per use case with an optional expiration date; medical authorisations cover medications and emergency care; emergency contacts and allergy alerts are on the same intake form. A foster or kinship placement completes the same intake flow, with the temporary-guardian designation noted and the expiration window set. The consent record is live from the first day — the child’s first check-in runs against the authorised-pickup list, the ratio count, and the media-consent gate before a single greeting goes out. A director who receives an enrollment application for a child mid-year can update custody and consent records at any point, with every change timestamped and preserved.

Step 2 · Daily operations — check-in, custody, ratio, incidents, meals

Each morning, staff open the check-in screen. A parent arrives and scans a QR code or enters a PIN; the engine matches them against the authorised-pickup list. A custody restriction or restraining order surfaces as a director alert before the adult reaches the room — not as a note on the front desk. The ratio monitor updates in real time as children and staff move between rooms. An incident report is written in the platform at the time of the event: timestamped, director-reviewed, and locked after guardian notification to prevent routine editing — a correction is a dated superseding entry, not an edit. Medication doses are logged with a timestamp and the administering staff member, referencing the medical authorisations recorded at intake. At meal service, each child’s participation is logged for the CACFP meal-count record. At the end of the day, proposed media shares pass through the consent gate and the director approval queue before any photo reaches a family inbox.

Step 3 · Compliance and billing — inspection readiness, subsidy tracking, CACFP export

The compliance cockpit tracks immunisation records against expiration dates, staff certifications against renewal dates, and background-check dates per staff member — surfacing alerts before they lapse. The SC licensing checklist view shows a director which required record types are complete and which have gaps, without manual cross-referencing, before an inspector arrives. The inspection binder export assembles required records into a portable package when available. The billing engine applies each child’s tuition plan on the configured cycle: family balance, subsidy receivable, and any sibling discount are calculated separately and shown to the director before the charge rail runs. The CACFP meal-count export maps the per-meal, per-child logs to the monthly claim worksheet a director submits to the sponsoring organisation. The billing engine and compliance records model are built; the charge rail, binder-export UI, and CACFP export are in active development.

Step 4 · Year-end & data portability — consent audit, retention, and exit

At year-end, the consent audit export produces a complete history for every child: every custody flag, every consent record, every revocation, every timestamped update to authorised-pickup lists or media permissions, in a format portable outside the platform. The billing ledger provides an annual summary per family including the tax-statement export. Families with children ageing out of the program receive a data-export and a notification that their records will be deleted under the configured retention window — the platform does not hold a permanent archive of child data beyond what a guardian chose to retain. The organisation owns its data. One-click export is available in writing to any organisation: if the center ever leaves the platform, every record — enrollment, attendance, billing, consent, incident, medication, meal-count — leaves with it.

The full platform

Five engines — honest about what is built and what is coming

Every feature is labelled honestly: Built means the underlying engine is production-ready. In development means the surface, wire-up, or carrier integration is in active build. We do not claim otherwise.

QR/PIN check-in with custody enforcement and real-time ratio monitoring

The check-in engine manages arrivals and departures through QR code or PIN, matched against each child’s authorized-pickup list from the Custody-Safe Consent Ledger. A guardian not on the list cannot check out a child — enforced at the engine, not by a reminder to the door staff. A custody restriction or restraining order flag surfaces immediately at the check-in screen, with a director alert before a non-authorised adult reaches the classroom. Staff clock in and out against rooms, and the ratio monitor tracks the licensed child-to-staff ratio per classroom in real time — surfacing a warning before a ratio violation occurs rather than logging it after the fact. Late-pickup tracking, classroom transfers, and every pickup log land in the same audit trail as the consent records, so a licensing inspector sees one coherent record across check-in, custody, and ratio. The check-in and ratio monitoring engine is built and production-ready on the BAS/after-school substrate.

Check-in engine built · production-ready

SC licensing compliance cockpit — immunisations, incidents, staff records, inspection binder

The compliance cockpit covers the records a licensing inspector requests on arrival: immunisation records per child with expiration alerts before they lapse, incident reports written at the time of the event and timestamped and locked after director sign-off, medication-administration logs requiring a prior written authorisation before a dose is recorded, staff-certification dates with renewal alerts, and background-check dates per staff member. The South Carolina childcare-licensing checklist is the initial compliance surface — a director can see which required record types have gaps before an inspector arrives rather than discovering them during the visit. The inspection binder export assembles the required licensing records into a portable, printable package at a director’s request; additional state configurations follow SC. The underlying records model for every compliance record type is built. The inspection binder export UI and any state-specific checklist beyond SC are in active development. We provide early-access partners with a free SC Daycare Inspection Binder Checklist as a paper reference while the export surface is in build.

Records model built · SC compliance checklist available · binder export in development

Billing, subsidy tracking, and CACFP meal-count — early access

The billing engine handles tuition plans, deposit schedules, sibling discounts, subsidy receivables (state childcare assistance, voucher-funded slots), late fees, receipts, and annual tax statements. A director configures a tuition plan at enrollment; the engine applies it on the billing cycle without manual re-entry. Subsidy receivables are tracked separately from family balances so the director sees both at a glance without reconciling two spreadsheets. The billing engine is built and production-ready on the tuition.software substrate. The charge rail that moves money is honest-off — present in the platform, not enabled for live transactions today. CACFP meal-count tracking and claim-export are in early access: the records model is built for per-meal, per-child, per-day logging, and the export format that maps to the CACFP monthly claim worksheet is in active development. We do not claim automated CACFP filing or live submission — the tool produces a meal-count export a director carries into the claim process. We provide early-access partners with a free Photo Consent Policy Template as a starting document for their family handbook.

Billing engine built · charge rail honest-off · CACFP export in development

Who uses it

Built for the independent owner-director, the church daycare, and the small multi-site operator — all on one platform

Independent daycare centers and preschool/daycare hybrids

An independent center with 30 to 150 children runs on one director’s operational decisions. The check-in screen is at the front door at 7 a.m. The ratio monitor matters when the 3 p.m. rush hits and two staff members called in. The compliance cockpit tells the director which immunisation records lapse next month before the inspector arrives, not the morning of the inspection. The Custody-Safe Consent Ledger handles the divorce in classroom 3 without a sticky note on the front desk. A director who also owns a preschool program on the same campus runs both under the same platform instance without separate tools.

Church daycares and faith-affiliated programs

A church daycare operates under both state licensing requirements and the church’s own data-governance and safeguarding policies. The platform does not build a parent social feed or a public child profile. Communication routes through the consent-gated channel only — a family that has not opted in does not receive messages. Photo consent is recorded per use case: a photo in a weekly parent update is a different consent record from a photo in the church bulletin. The background-check tracking in the compliance cockpit handles staff and volunteer credential records for the church’s safeguarding requirements. The Custody-Safe Consent Ledger is available to any family, regardless of household configuration, without requiring a special accommodation request.

Small multi-site operators

An operator running two to four daycare locations faces the same compliance requirements at each site and the same custody and consent complexity across a shared family base. A family with children at two locations carries one consent record — not two separate enrollment forms that can drift out of sync. The multi-site owner dashboard aggregates enrollment, ratio gaps, compliance exceptions, and billing AR across locations in one view. The inspection binder export can be run per location for site-specific inspections. Staff certifications and background-check dates are tracked per individual, so a staff member who moves between locations does not require a new credential record.

Security posture — what we are and what we are not

Not an ad network. Not a child social platform. Not a data broker.

Guardian and child data is owned by your organisation. No family data is sold to or shared with outside companies or advertisers. No behavioural advertising. No third-party tracking pixels on the platform. No enrichment marketplace suggesting products to parents inside the app. No lead resale. The platform is a daycare operations tool, not a family engagement network.

Child data runs on our own private systems. It is encrypted in transit. It is never sent to outside companies for profit. It is deleted on request under the configured retention window. Access is role-controlled: a room teacher sees only the children in their classroom; a billing administrator sees billing records but not medical authorisations; a guardian sees only their own child’s records. Audit logs record every access to a child’s record by role.

We are COPPA-conscious and FERPA-aware for programs operating under those frameworks. We do not claim a SOC2 certification, a HIPAA covered-entity status, or a FERPA-certified badge we have not yet earned. Those are specific designations we state honestly when earned, not in advance.

What is built and what is coming — plainly

The core engines are built. The charge rail and several surfaces are not live yet.

Built and production-ready today: the Custody-Safe Consent Ledger (custody flags, restraining order enforcement, expiring authorisations, the fail-closed group-photo consent conflict resolver, consent audit export); the QR/PIN check-in engine with custody enforcement and fail-closed ratio monitoring; the billing engine (tuition plans, subsidy tracking, sibling discounts, receipts, tax statements); the consent substrate with per-use-case scoping, revocation, and expiring windows; and the consent-gated private gallery substrate for photos and media.

Not yet enabled for live use: the charge rail (the part that moves money), the director media-approval queue UI, live carrier delivery for parent communications, the SC inspection binder export UI, and the CACFP meal-count export. These are honest-off — present in the platform, not enabled for live use. There is no live checkout here. No billing. No subscription. Owner-directors deserve to know what is production-ready and what is still being wired.

Connected to the school platform

Daycare Software is the owner-director entry point into the same substrate as the school platform.

Daycare Software, Childcare Software, and Afterschool Software run on the same consent, check-in, and billing substrate — intentional house-of-brands siblings on one platform, distinct by buyer persona and positioning. A child who ages from a daycare program into kindergarten carries their consent record into the school publishing platform without re-enrollment. Tuition Software is the billing engine that runs under all three, handling family balances, subsidy receivables, and tax statements. For the school photography side, k12.photos handles picture-day scheduling and parent ordering, with consent records from the daycare ledger governing which children appear in any class photo.

childcare.software afterschool.software tuition.software homeroom.software

Early access · Daycare directors, center owners, program administrators

Book a conversation to see the current state honestly

Daycare Software is in active development. We do conversations that show the current state honestly: the check-in screen running a simulated arrival against an authorised-pickup list with a custody flag; the ratio monitor updating in real time as classrooms fill; the Custody-Safe Consent Ledger showing a per-child consent record with a revocation and an expiring temporary authorisation; the billing engine modelling a tuition plan with a subsidy receivable; and the SC compliance cockpit showing an immunisation expiration alert. There is no pricing commitment and no signup. If it looks right for your center, we discuss what early access looks like.

To book: email [email protected].

FAQ

Common questions

What is the Custody-Safe Consent Ledger, and why custody specifically?

A typical enrollment form collects one signature. The Custody-Safe Consent Ledger records what that signature actually means — which guardian can pick up, under what conditions, with what media permissions, and for how long. The “custody-safe” frame means it handles the situations that break a normal consent model: a custody order that restricts one parent’s access, a foster placement where the authorised guardian may change, a restraining order that must be enforced at the check-in screen before the adult reaches the classroom, a temporary consent that expires when a court date passes. Each record is time-stamped, scoped to a specific use case, and revocable at any time. Revocation is enforced at the engine — a photo locked by a revoked consent does not route to any family, without a staff member manually hunting it down. The ledger produces the full consent audit export on demand: every record, every change, every revocation, portable outside the platform and readable in a licensing inspection or a family-court proceeding.

How does check-in handle a parent who is not authorised or who is subject to a custody restriction?

A guardian not on the authorised-pickup list cannot check out a child — enforced at the check-in engine, not by a policy reminder. When a parent presents at the door, the engine looks up the child’s authorised-pickup list from the Custody-Safe Consent Ledger. If the adult is not on it, check-in is blocked and the director is alerted. A custody restriction or restraining order flag surfaces as a director alert before the adult reaches the classroom — the engine does not silently log the mismatch and let staff handle it improvised; it surfaces the flag immediately. A director who receives a new custody order mid-year records it in the ledger, effective immediately, with the prior authorisation preserved in the audit trail. The check-in engine is built and production-ready on the BAS substrate.

Is the billing engine live? Can we run tuition and subsidy billing now?

The billing engine — the part that calculates tuition plans, applies sibling discounts, tracks subsidy receivables, records receipts, and produces tax statements — is built and production-ready on the tuition.software substrate. The charge rail, the part that moves money from a family’s account to the center’s, is honest-off: it exists in the platform but is not enabled for live transactions today. There is no live checkout, no billing, and no subscription. When the charge rail is enabled (a founder-gated decision), programs will be notified. A conversation is the honest next step — we show the billing engine working in a demo and discuss what early access looks like.

How does consent-safe photo sharing work? What is the approval queue?

When a staff member captures or uploads a photo, the media engine checks it against the Custody-Safe Consent Ledger before the image routes to any family. A child without an active photo consent record does not appear in any share or daily-report composition — the engine blocks the route automatically. A director approval queue holds every proposed share before it goes to families: the director sees the image, confirms it is appropriate, and approves the specific recipients based on their consent records. Shared links are time-limited — a link sent to a grandparent does not persist indefinitely. There are no public galleries, no searchable child profiles, and no social-feed-style streams. The gallery substrate and consent-gated delivery are built and production-ready. The director approval queue UI — the surface that holds shares for director review before routing — is in active development. The parent storefront for ordering prints is built; the checkout that accepts payment is honest-off today.

What does the SC licensing compliance cockpit cover?

The compliance cockpit covers the records a South Carolina DSS licensing inspector asks for on arrival: immunisation records per child with expiration alerts before they lapse, incident reports timestamped and locked after director and guardian sign-off, medication-administration logs with per-dose records against prior written authorisations, staff-certification dates with renewal alerts, and background-check dates per staff member. The SC licensing checklist view shows a director which required record types are complete and which have gaps, so the director can act before an inspection rather than during it. We provide early-access partners with a free SC Daycare Inspection Binder Checklist as a paper reference. The inspection binder export — which assembles required records into a portable, printable package — is in active development. The underlying records model for every compliance record type is built. Additional state configurations follow SC.

What about CACFP? Can it replace my meal count sheets?

Not yet, but that is the direction. The records model for per-meal, per-child, per-day meal-count logging is built. The platform logs each child’s participation at breakfast, lunch, and PM snack, against the CACFP categories. The export that maps those logs to the monthly claim worksheet a director submits to the sponsoring organisation is in active development. We do not claim automated CACFP filing or live submission to any agency — the tool produces a meal-count export a director carries into the claim process. When the CACFP export surface is ready, early-access partners will be the first to see it. In the meantime, a conversation will show the current meal-count data model and how the export is being built.

What happens when a child’s custody situation changes mid-enrollment?

A director records the custody change in the Custody-Safe Consent Ledger at any point. The change is effective immediately — not at the next billing cycle or the next enrollment renewal. The prior authorisation is preserved in the audit trail with its own timestamp, so the record shows both the previous state and the new one. A restraining order flag can be added to an existing enrollment record and will surface at the next check-in attempt by the flagged adult. Consent records with expiration windows expire automatically on the set date and do not silently persist — a temporary foster placement’s photo consent expires when the director configured it to, without the director needing to remember to revoke it manually. The consent ledger produces an audit export for any date range, including the period before and after a custody change, which can be provided to a family-court attorney on request.

Is this a parent app or a parent social network?

No. The parent communication engine sends daily reports, announcements, and direct messages to opted-in families. There is no parent-to-parent feed, no comment thread on a child’s photo, no community forum, and no social-media-style notification stream. A parent who does not opt in to communications receives no messages — they can still access their child’s consent and billing records through the guardian portal, but they are not enrolled in a communication list without their explicit choice. This is by design. A daycare platform that looks like a social network creates data-hygiene and minor-safety risks the platform should not introduce.

How is Daycare Software different from Childcare Software at childcare.software?

They run on the same consent, check-in, and billing substrate — they are intentional house-of-brands siblings on the same platform. The difference is positioning and persona. Childcare Software is built for a broader institutional buyer: licensed centers, preschools, after-school programs, and school-run early childhood programs with an enterprise-adjacent operations need. Daycare Software is built for the independent owner-director of a 20--150-child center who wears every hat — the person who is on the check-in screen at 7 a.m., reconciling subsidy receivables at noon, and on a state licensing portal at 4 p.m. The custody-safe framing — the explicit handling of divorced households, foster placements, restraining orders, and expiring consent windows — is the daycare-specific differentiator that comes from the practical realities of the owner-operator at that scale.

What can our center actually use right now?

The platform is in active development. In a demo we walk through the current state honestly: the check-in screen running a simulated arrival against an authorised-pickup list with a custody flag; the ratio monitor updating in real time; the Custody-Safe Consent Ledger showing a per-child consent record with a revocation and an expiring temporary authorisation; the billing engine modelling a tuition plan with a subsidy receivable and a sibling discount before the charge rail is enabled; and the SC compliance cockpit showing an immunisation record with an expiration alert. None of those involve live payments or live carrier delivery today. A conversation is the honest next step — we show what is built, what the charge-rail and compliance-surface timelines look like, and what early access means for your program.

What happens to our data if we leave?

The organisation owns its data. One-click export is available in writing — if the center ever leaves the platform, every record leaves with it: enrollment history, attendance logs, billing ledger, custody and consent records, incident reports, medication-administration logs, meal-count records, and communication history. The export is in a portable format a director can read without the platform. Records for children who age out of the program are deleted under the configured retention window — the platform does not hold a permanent archive of child data beyond what a guardian actively chose to retain. This guarantee is part of the onboarding agreement, not a footnote in the terms of service.

When is the full platform available?

The platform is in active development. Built and production-ready today: the Custody-Safe Consent Ledger (custody flags, expiring authorisations, restraining order enforcement, consent audit export); the QR/PIN check-in and attendance engine with custody enforcement and real-time ratio monitoring; the billing engine (charge rail honest-off); the consent substrate with per-use-case scoping, revocation, and expiring windows; and the consent-gated private gallery substrate. In active development: the director media-approval queue UI, the charge rail, live carrier delivery for parent communications, the SC inspection binder export UI, and the CACFP meal-count export. The best next step is a conversation where we show the current state honestly and discuss what early access looks like for your center.