Childcare billing software that turns your rate sheet into invoices on schedule

Most small providers start billing in a spreadsheet, and for the first few families it works. The trouble starts when the rules pile up. One child is weekly and another monthly. Two siblings share a discount. A family owes for last month's trip. Someone paid half by transfer and half in cash. Each exception lives in a different cell, a different colour or a different note, and the person who understands the sheet is the only one who can send invoices.

The practical cost is time and trust. Invoices go out late because they are assembled by hand. Parents receive totals without lines and ask what they are paying for. Overdue balances are noticed only when someone scrolls far enough. And when an accountant asks for a year of invoices, the answer is a folder of separately edited documents.

Childcare billing software should remove the assembly step. You describe how each family is charged once, and the system produces consistent invoices on a schedule. That is the part DCare.app is designed to do well.

Every child in DCare.app has a rate and a frequency. When you generate invoices, the system looks at each active child, works out what is due for the current period, and groups the result by family. The parent receives one invoice listing each child as a separate line, followed by any discount and any one-off charges that are due.

• Weekly ratesWeekly invoices are drafted for the week starting on Monday. They suit providers whose families book and pay week by week.
• Monthly ratesMonthly invoices are drafted on the billing day you choose in Settings, such as the 1st or the 25th of the month.
• Sibling discountA percentage on the family record. It applies to every child except the one with the highest monthly-equivalent rate.
• One-off chargesField trips, supplies, a late pickup or an extra day. Each has a description, an amount and its own due date.

Each invoice receives a sequential number, an issue date, a due date and a period label so that families and accountants can refer to it unambiguously. Inactive children are skipped, so a child who leaves at the end of a month is simply marked inactive rather than deleted, and their history stays intact.

DCare.app supports two regions. Europe bills in EUR, writes dates day first and uses a 24-hour clock. The United States bills in USD, writes dates month first and uses a 12-hour clock. You choose the region when you create your account, and it applies to every invoice and payment on that account.

There is no automatic conversion between currencies, and existing invoices are never relabelled if a setting changes. That is a deliberate choice. A tuition invoice is a statement of what a family owes in the currency they agreed to pay, and silently converting it would create disputes, not convenience. Our subscription prices follow the same principle: they are regional list prices of 49 and 99 in each currency, not exchange-rate conversions.

If you operate in a country that uses neither euro nor dollars, DCare.app cannot bill your families today.

Recurring fees are only half of childcare billing. The rest is the small extras that are easy to forget: a museum trip, a replacement water bottle, a registration fee, or a parent who arrived forty minutes after closing. In DCare.app these become one-off charges on the family. You choose the family, write a short description that the parent will read, enter the amount and set a due date.

You can store your late pickup fee and closing time in Settings, which keeps the figure consistent between staff and makes it easy to add the charge when it happens. Because every check-out is time-stamped by the kiosk, you have a record to point to if a parent asks why the charge was applied.

Charges appear on the family's invoice and in the parent portal straight away, with the description you wrote, so there is no separate email to compose and no risk of the extra being lost before the next billing run.

The Today screen shows the total outstanding across all families, the amount collected, and a list of families with overdue invoices. The billing page lets you filter invoices by open, overdue or paid, open any invoice to see its lines, and check which payments have been recorded against it.

When a family pays you outside DCare.app, for example by bank transfer, cash or cheque, the owner can record that payment against the invoice. The dialog shows the invoice number, family and full outstanding amount in the account currency, asks for the method and the date the money was received, and requires an explicit confirmation that the money has already arrived. Recording a payment marks the invoice as paid and adds a receipt section to the printable invoice. It does not take or move any money; it is a ledger entry.

Payments can only be recorded for the full outstanding balance and only on dates between the invoice issue date and today in your time zone, which keeps the ledger consistent with what actually happened.

DCare.app is being built to accept online payments through Stripe: cards and SEPA Direct Debit for euro accounts, and cards and ACH bank debits for dollar accounts, with optional autopay for parents. That integration is not active yet, and no account can take online payments today.

Where payment is not set up, the billing page shows a clear "Stripe setup required" notice, and the parent portal tells families that online payment is not available and they should pay the provider directly. Pay buttons only appear once payments are genuinely available. We have chosen to say this on our marketing pages too, because finding out after you have invited forty families would be a poor start.

Processing fees charged by the payment provider will be separate from the DCare.app subscription when payments go live.

Parents sign in to a portal that shows their balance, every invoice with its lines, and the payments recorded against them. Each invoice has a printable view that can be saved as a PDF from the browser, showing your provider name, the family, the period, dates, lines, total and, if paid, the recorded payment. Parents no longer need to ask for a copy of last month's invoice.

For your own books, invoices and payments export as CSV files that open in any spreadsheet or accounting tool, and the owner can download a complete JSON export of the account. These are operational billing records. They do not add VAT, tax identifiers or country-specific statutory wording, so check with your accountant whether they meet your local requirements before treating them as tax invoices.

The cleanest moment to switch is at the start of a billing period. Before that day, work through these steps.

1. 1
   Collect your current rates. List every enrolled child with their rate and whether it is weekly or monthly.
2. 2
   Add families and children. Enter parent names and emails, then each child with their rate and frequency.
3. 3
   Set discounts and fees. Add sibling discounts on family records, and set your billing day and late pickup fee in Settings.
4. 4
   Settle the old system. Finish collecting the last period in your old method so DCare.app starts with a clean slate.
5. 5
   Generate and review. Generate invoices for the new period, open a few to check the lines, and invite parents to the portal.

Do not try to import years of historic invoices. Keep the old records where they are and let DCare.app take over from a clear start date.

DCare.app does not calculate subsidies, vouchers or government-funded hours, and it does not file claims with any agency. It does not issue tax statements for parents. It does not split one invoice across several payers, and it does not handle partial payments: a payment is recorded for the full outstanding balance. It bills in EUR or USD only. Online payment collection is pending, as described above.

If those limits are acceptable, DCare.app takes most of the repetitive work out of billing for a small provider. If any of them is essential to how you run, it is better to know now.

It helps to picture what a normal month looks like once billing has moved into DCare.app. On or just after your billing day, the owner opens the Billing page and presses Generate invoices. Within a moment every family with active children has an invoice for the period, each with a number, a due date seven days later and one line per child. The owner opens two or three at random, checks the lines against what they expect, and the invoices are immediately visible to parents in their portal.

During the month, extras are added as they happen rather than saved up. A trip is announced, so a one-off charge goes to every attending family. A parent collects late on a Thursday, so the late pickup fee is added the same evening with the time in the description. Each charge appears in the parent portal as soon as it is saved.

As payments arrive by transfer, cash or cheque, the owner records each one against its invoice. The overdue list on the Today screen shrinks as the month goes on, and by the due date it shows exactly which families still need a gentle message. At month end the invoice and payment CSV files go to the accountant, and nothing needs to be retyped.

Money is the most uncomfortable topic between a childcare provider and a family, largely because it usually comes up at the door, in front of children, when nobody has the numbers in front of them. Clear invoices change the tone. When every line has a description, every discount is visible, and every recorded payment appears in the parent's own history, most questions answer themselves before they are asked.

When a question does come up, both of you can open the same invoice and see the same figures. If a fee changed, the date of the change is clear from which invoices carry the new rate. If a late fee was applied, the check-out time is on the attendance record. The conversation becomes about facts rather than memory, which is kinder to everyone involved.