Childcare management software that lets you close the laptop by nap time.

Childcare management software is a broad label. At the large end it covers suites with learning journals, staff rotas, occupancy planning, payroll and multi-site reporting. At the small end it simply means the tools that replace a spreadsheet, a paper register and a group chat. DCare.app sits firmly at the small end, and that is a choice rather than a stage we are passing through.

The people we build for run one setting: a nursery or creche in Europe, or a licensed home daycare or small center in the United States, typically with somewhere between five and sixty children. The owner usually works on the floor and does the administration at the end of the day. For them, the valuable features are the ones that remove repeated work: invoices that generate themselves, check-ins that time-stamp themselves, and a parent portal that answers questions before they are asked.

Everything in DCare.app follows from that. The product has four parts that share one list of families and children: billing, attendance, the parent portal and messages. There is nothing to install, and a provider can usually set it up in one afternoon.

• BillingWeekly or monthly rates per child, sibling discounts per family, one-off charges and a billing day. Invoices are drafted for every family each period.
• AttendanceA tablet kiosk where parents check in and out with a personal PIN or QR code, plus staff registers and a daily report.
• Parent portalEach parent sees their balance, invoices, recorded payments and messages, sets their PIN, prints invoices and downloads their data.
• MessagesNotes to one family or to all families, kept with a date, read by parents in their portal.

Because these parts share one record, a change in one place is reflected everywhere. Mark a child inactive and they stop being billed and stop appearing at the kiosk. Add a parent to a family and they can sign in to the portal, see the invoices and check the children in. Invite a member of staff and they can take registers and send messages, without seeing billing or settings.

This shared record is the real reason to use childcare management software rather than three separate tools. The time saved is less about any single feature and more about not entering the same family three times.

DCare.app is used in English in two regions. Europe is the primary region: amounts in EUR, dates written day first, times on a 24-hour clock. The United States region uses USD, month-first dates and AM and PM times. You choose the region when you create your account and it applies to every invoice and payment on that account.

Regions affect formats and currency. They do not apply country-specific law. Choosing Europe does not make a nursery compliant with GDPR or with local invoice and VAT rules, and choosing the United States does not apply any state licensing requirements. We say this repeatedly on this site because it matters: software can make good practice easier, but the responsibility stays with the provider.

Our nursery management software page covers European settings in more depth, and our daycare software page covers US family child care homes.

Online payments in DCare.app are designed around Stripe: cards and SEPA Direct Debit for euro accounts, cards and ACH for dollar accounts, with optional autopay for parents. That integration is still being implemented and is not live. Today, no account can take a payment online.

What you can do now is record payments that families make to you directly. When a bank transfer, cash or a cheque arrives, the owner records it against the invoice with the method and date, after confirming the money has been received. The invoice is marked paid, the payment appears in the parent's history, and the printable invoice shows a receipt. This is ledger recording only and never moves money.

We are telling you this on the homepage because you should not have to discover it during setup.

A short list of absences will save some providers a wasted trial. DCare.app does not have learning journals, observations, photo sharing or daily reports for parents. It does not plan lessons or activities. It does not manage staff rotas, hours or payroll. It does not run several sites from one account. It does not calculate funded hours, subsidies or vouchers, or submit claims to any authority. It does not track meals for food programs. It bills only in EUR or USD.

If several of those are central to how you work, you will be better served by a larger suite. If you mainly need billing, attendance and a tidy line of communication with parents, DCare.app is designed for exactly that.

Families, children, attendance, invoices, payments and messages belong to the provider who entered them. Owners can download a complete JSON export of the account from Settings at any time, and invoices, payments and attendance are also available as CSV files for an accountant or a spreadsheet. Parents can download the data held about their own family from the portal.

Access is divided by role. Owners see everything. Staff see families, children, attendance and messages, but not billing. Parents see only their own family. The kiosk sees only the family whose PIN or QR code was just entered.

1. 1
   Create your setting. Choose a name, region, time zone and plan. The trial lasts 14 days and does not ask for a card.
2. 2
   Add families and children. Parent names and emails, then each child with a rate and weekly or monthly frequency.
3. 3
   Invite staff and open the kiosk. Staff get their own logins. Parents set a PIN from the portal and use the tablet at the door.
4. 4
   Generate invoices. Run the first billing period, check a few invoices, and point parents to their portal.

Our help and getting started page walks through each step with the decisions you will face along the way.

At opening time a tablet by the door is already showing the kiosk keypad. Parents arrive, enter their own PIN or show their QR code, tap their children in and leave. The owner, busy with the first breakfast, can see on the Today screen how many children are present against how many are enrolled, without counting heads off a clipboard.

Mid-morning, a practitioner sends a message to all families: the garden is closed this afternoon for maintenance, so please send indoor shoes. It is stored with today's date, and parents read it in their portal. At lunchtime a parent rings to ask what they owe this month. The answer is already in their portal, line by line, and the owner can point them to it.

In the afternoon a family collects after closing time. The kiosk records the check-out time and who collected, and that evening the owner adds the late pickup fee as a one-off charge with a short description. Two families paid by bank transfer during the day; the owner records both payments against their invoices, and the overdue list on the Today screen shrinks.

None of this is clever. It is just the routine paperwork of a childcare setting, done in the moment instead of at the end of the week. That is the whole idea.

Whether or not you choose DCare.app, a few questions make any comparison clearer. First, list the jobs you actually do every week, not the features you might use someday. Second, check that the software bills in your currency and follows your date and time conventions. Third, ask exactly how parents pay today, and whether online payment is live or only planned. Fourth, check who can see what: staff access to billing is a common concern. Fifth, make sure you can export all of your data in a usable format, at any time, without asking.

Finally, run a real billing period during the trial with a handful of families. Marketing pages, including this one, can only tell you so much. A week of real check-ins and one real set of invoices will tell you whether a system fits the way you work.

A childcare setting has three kinds of people who need the same records for different reasons. The owner needs everything: rates, invoices, recorded payments, attendance, messages and settings. Staff need to know which children are expected, who has arrived and who collected them, and they need to send a quick note to a family. Parents need to see only their own family: what they owe, what they have paid, what you have told them and how to check in.

DCare.app separates these roles from the start. The owner account holds billing and settings. Staff accounts, invited by email, cover attendance, families and messages, but not money. Parent accounts are linked by email to exactly one family. The kiosk is a fourth, narrower role that can only check in the children of whoever has just identified themselves.

Getting these boundaries right is not only a privacy matter. It means you can hand a practitioner a login on their first day without a second thought, and that a parent at the door never sees another family's name on the screen.