I am a tech entrepreneur researching the needs of small to mid-size daycare and pre-schools to provide modern mobile and web based software for day to day operations of a home based day care.

Are there pain points in your day to day operations that you wish could be automated and solved by a mobile or web application? For eg., being able to send an email with a link to the parent of a new child in your care to collect all the information and generating forms that they can sign digitally/print thereby reducing the enrollment

Everyone has a mobile phone and/or tablet these days, however i still see a lot of the daycare doing a lot of their operations manually on pen & paper.

Any feedback you can give me will be deeply appreciated.

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Here are some more threads from software developers that have visited here: https://www.daycare.com/forum/tags.p...ycare+software

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Micheal: Thank you for the pointer to the threads. Many have said that they use Minute Meals Pro and did not see any other solution mentioned.

I wonder if any of you use any smartphone/tablet based solutions to run your daycare. Everyone has a very powerful computer in their hands (smartphones) and one ought to be able to do most of the day to day operations of a daycare using a smartphone and/or tablet.

If anyone is willing to help me understand what the most important features are to them and what they would be willing to pay for it , I will promise to give them early access to the software and provide the solution for free to them for at least the first year. Since I don't run a daycare and only encounter them as a parent, it is very hard for understand what really matters.

Thanks a lot for your help folks.

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I pretty much guarantee that most of us use Minute Menu Kids Pro because so far it's what's most complete and cost effective for us family child care providers. There was another company that I found came pretty close to MMK called Cake Child Care but it did have drawbacks ... costlier (probably better for centers than family child care, more difficult to set up and set up took longer, record keeping was more difficult and didn't let you print out tax forms with your record keeping information etc.).

I did like that parents would log their kids in by punching in their codes and a photo would be taken but I personally like the paper sign in sheets with the actual parent signature. If someone would merge all of the perks and features of MMK and Cake together and keep the cost at a flat low yearly fee like MMK without charging a fee to clients I'd be willing to try it out and make the switch. I love the idea of only having one all inclusive program at a cost effective low price ... we all use MMK because it gets the job done, is simple to set up and use and it's one flat fee.

I'd want a program that worked on all platforms (desktops, tablets, Apple products etc) since I own both. It would be great to be able to mainly use the program on my desktop or laptop computers yet be able to open an app on my phone or tablet to mark attendance, meals etc. from wherever I was (like when I go to the park and pack a lunch).

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MarinaVanessa: Thank you so much for that wonderful feedback. It really helped me understand what is important to you. I will look at both MinuteMenu and CakeChildCare. My target is to provide a service for the home based daycare centers that is very easy to get started on and free for basic features and a low flat fee for premium features.

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