Automated waitlist management simplifies and streamlines enquiries and enrolments for less admin.

Automated waitlist management—a massive time-saver

Efficiently managing your waitlist not only provides you with peace of mind. It also benefits your service’s reputation in the long run. Automating as much of the waitlist and enrolment process as possible will save you vast amounts of time while ensuring you don’t miss the opportunity to fill empty spots.

The end of the year is often a hectic time for childcare services with RS7s and other service management upkeep. But if you don’t prioritise your waitlist and enrolments, you risk missing out on filling all your available spots. This is the time when you need to consider how many places have become available and how long your waitlist is so you can accurately forecast your capacity for the coming year.

Discover by Xplor greatly assists you with all these tasks with its reports, forecast data and specific demographic data about the children enroled in your service and those waiting to attend.

Before the hustle and bustle starts, now is the time to contact families to determine if they want to remain on the waitlist or their currently enroled children to continue attending your service. Discover provides you and families with ease of communication. You can establish a good rapport and increase the goodwill of your service with families while they wait for a place for their child.

Running a daycare or childcare service takes a lot of effort. You always have a million different things you could be doing. Fielding constant enquiries and moving a child from waitlisted status to enroling them can be quite taxing. Stressing about effective waitlist management is the last thing you need. Discover’s automated waitlist management functionality helps you stay on top of enquiries and enrolments with several automated and time-saving features.

Why you should consider Discover’s automated waitlist management

Different platforms will promise ease of use in a sector that revolves around re-enrolments, attendance confirmations, endless reporting and a to-do list that never ends. This article focuses on how Discover’s tools can help boost your service’s productivity and efficiency with its automated waitlist management.

Discover’s automated waitlist management feature is a powerful tool that boosts organisational efficiency. It can help increase your enrolment figures, particularly if you struggle with managing capacity at your service.

With Discover’s waitlist, enjoy the assurance of an automated workflow coupled with timely updates to keep track of all enrolments. You’ll have peace of mind knowing that all enrolments will be correctly attributed to the correct children and staff members. Discover’s waitlist support keeps you on top of everything so that you can focus on what you do best—providing care to the children entrusted to you.

Decisions based on accurate reports

Discover’s built-in Enquiries Tab allows you to keep track of the enquiries that come into your service and determine where those enquiries came from. This tab not only enables you to see accepted enquiries, but you can also sort them by source. From a business point of view, this enables you to make data-driven decisions. With this knowledge in hand, you can determine whether to focus on your Instagram page or see if the biggest driver of business for you is from playgroup referrals.

Discover’s automated waitlist management enquiry flow

Discover’s enrolment process keeps things as simple as possible by making it easy for you to track enquiries, waitlists and enrolments. Just add your logo to your enquiry form and share the link. Once a family submits the form, the information will flow into Discover and be accessible under each child’s profile. You’ll receive notifications of every enquiry submitted via this online form.

Once a child’s profile is live in Discover, administrators can click on a child’s profile to access the Marketing Tab. You can view helpful data points, such as where the enquiry came from (i.e. playgroup, Instagram, word of mouth, etc.). When sending information or messages to families from this tab, you have the option of creating reusable templates for routine messages or customising each message for that personal touch. You can also easily see the enquiry status, whether they have already been sent information, have already completed a tour of the service or have already been accepted.

Child details update automatically

Everything about the child and the care they require is logged in Discover. It’s seamlessly integrated into the automated waitlist management functionality. You can view all this information on the profile of each child and provide a clear call-to-action for centre admins on the next step for each child.

Discover will also note when a parent/guardian last provided confirmation they wanted to add their child to your service’s waitlist. This is helpful for follow-ups, especially if your service is nearing capacity. Discover will also note the last time you emailed a parent/guardian confirming they want their child to remain on the waitlist. It’s important to note that the enquiry form is optional. Parents/guardians can complete an enrolment form once a space becomes available for their child.

Finally, the Transitions Tab makes managing rooms and waitlists a breeze. With an overview of each room and the children on your waitlist, it’s easy to see which rooms have spots for waitlisted children. The drag-and-drop functionality on the Transitions Tab makes moving children between rooms quick and simple. This powerful forecasting tool helps ensure you have places for waitlisted children. It also enables you to keep track of planned transitions for children attending your service.

Custom widget setup

This setup widget allows for some customisation to your enquiry form. Discover users can add branding and change colours to provide families with an enquiry experience tailored to your service’s brand. You can also hide fields you don’t require from the form, provided they are not mandatory fields the platform requires.

Your service’s web developer can also customise the widget. Simply download a document to provide to your web developer, who can add the customised widget to your service’s site. Discover also provides an API key so that they can capture the data from the form. It then flows directly into your service’s system via Discover.

Once the widget is up and running, any parent/guardian can access the form and complete information on who they are, who their child is and what days they require care. Discover’s platform will then inform you that a new enquiry has just come in. All submitted information will be available on Discover’s convenient dashboard.

Demographics at a glance

You can easily see the demographics at your service and view the enrolments sorted by

• Age
• Languages spoken
• Enroled children
• The number of children currently on an enquiring status
• Number waitlisted

The Enroled Children Demographics feature also shows future enrolments and real-time numbers for future enrolments.

Reports and forecasting

Discover has a robust reporting feature integrated into its automated waitlist management. This allows you to seamlessly pull up general children reports such as roll call, blank enrolment form, child details and children enrolments. Centre admins can also access the Enrolment Agreement Form. This contains all of the child’s details during enrolment once the parent has agreed to enrol their child.

Discover can also generate a report on when children are leaving the service and when their last day will be. This can help you forecast capacity and facilitate whether or not to accept children from your current waitlist.

Automated waitlist management—emails for waitlisted children

Service administrators can enable the automatic waitlist confirmation emails in the platform’s centre settings. Once enabled, Discover periodically sends an email to confirm whether families wish to remain on the waitlist. You can sort this report by application date, child age, intended start date or the number of weeks since the parent/guardian last confirmed they want to stay on the waitlist.

Management statistics forecasting

With everything being done automatically and all your data stored securely in Discover, you have access to more accurate forecasting. You can quickly see how many booked in and waitlisted children there are.

That information also pulls into Discover’s weekly management statistics for each service. It can show a week-to-week P&L statistic to show the service where they are at from a weekly financial point of view. This table shows the service’s total funded hours as it shows a Full Time Equivalent (FTE) based on funded hours.

More importantly, this feature shows the value of the enrolments to be invoiced from a specific period. This is particularly handy for services that don’t send out invoices weekly.

Enrolment for an unborn child

One of Discover’s unique features is the ability to create a waitlist enrolment for an unborn child. Due to several factors, such as teacher shortages and increased demand, wait times for placements have drastically increased. According to the Government, families in New Zealand now must typically wait six months or longer for a spot in early childhood services. This time increases for children aged two and under.

Discover helps by allowing services to enrol their child, even if the mother hasn’t yet given birth. You may create an enrolment for a child aged 0 months and fill in the essential details, such as the enrolment times and the date you’d like the child to start, using any date as a placeholder. Select the status as “Waitlisted”, and the child is now enroled in the system.

Discover’s automated waitlist management provides services with a competitive advantage

For services fortunate enough to have waitlists, the inevitable struggle of managing enquiries, shuffling between questions from families and offering spots at your service will end up taking a toll on you. You risk administrators burning out or leaving money on the table because of missed opportunities.

Services with the right tools to manage their day-to-day tasks in one place will have the edge over other services. The best thing for your service is to use the best software to help you not just with your waitlists but also your entire childcare workflow. Learn how Discover can give you the edge in your daily operations by scheduling a demo with us. We’d love to walk you through everything Discover has to offer in a quick free demo.

Dean Comeau

Marketing Team Lead

With a 20+ year career in education, Dean has been writing about Discover by Xplor’s student management system and childcare software suite for over three years.