Nursery management software for small European nurseries that bill in euro

Search for nursery management software and you will find large suites that try to do everything: learning journals, staff rotas, occupancy forecasting, funding claims, payroll exports and parent apps with photo feeds. Those suites suit groups with an office team. A single nursery run by a manager who also covers ratios at lunchtime usually needs something smaller: a reliable way to bill families, know who is in the building, and tell parents what is happening.

DCare.app is built around that smaller job. It keeps a register of families and children, turns each child's fee into invoices on a schedule you set, records arrivals and collections from a tablet at the door, and gives every parent a private portal with their invoices and your messages. Staff can be invited to take the register and message families without seeing the finances.

It is just as important to say what it does not do. There is no learning journal, no observation or photo sharing, no lesson or activity planning, no staff rota, and no support for running several sites from one account. If your nursery depends on those features today, a broader suite will fit better, and you should not switch for billing alone.

When you create your nursery you choose the Europe region. From then on amounts are shown and invoiced in EUR, dates are written day first, and times use the 24-hour clock that parents and staff expect. The region sets the currency for the whole account, and invoices that already exist are never converted or relabelled if settings change later.

Each child carries a fee and a frequency, weekly or monthly. On your billing day DCare.app drafts one invoice per family for the period, listing each child as its own line so parents can see exactly what they are paying for. If a family has more than one child enrolled, you can set a sibling discount as a percentage on the family record. It applies to every child except the one with the highest monthly-equivalent fee, which matches how most nurseries describe a sibling reduction on their fee sheet.

Anything that does not repeat every period is added as a one-off charge against a family: a trip, a replacement bag, an extra session agreed at short notice, or a late collection. Charges carry their own description and due date, so the parent sees a clear reason and the manager does not have to remember it at the end of the month.

Most small nurseries already publish a fee sheet, and the easiest way to set up any software is to copy that sheet rather than redesign it. Before you start, look at how each line on your sheet is actually charged and decide which of three shapes it takes.

• A fixed monthly feeEnter it as a monthly fee on the child. The same amount appears on every monthly invoice until you change it.
• A weekly rateEnter it as a weekly fee. Weekly invoices are generated on Mondays for the week, which suits families who book week by week.
• An occasional extraAdd it as a one-off charge when it happens. It is invoiced to the family with its own description and due date.
• A family-level reductionUse the sibling discount on the family record. It is a percentage, not a fixed amount, and it is visible on the invoice line.

If your nursery receives public funding or subsidies for some hours, DCare.app does not calculate those hours or prepare claims for any authority. Some managers handle this by entering the fee the family actually pays after the funded portion, and keeping funding records in the tool their local authority or agency requires. That is a workaround, not a funding feature, and you should check it against how your scheme expects parent invoices to look.

Paper sign-in sheets have a familiar set of problems: illegible times, missing collection names, and a clipboard that walks off to the kitchen. DCare.app replaces the sheet with a tablet in kiosk mode. A parent enters their own four-digit PIN, or shows a personal QR code from their phone, chooses which children they are dropping off or collecting, and the time is recorded in your nursery's time zone.

Because every parent has their own PIN, the record shows which adult collected each child, not just that a collection happened. Parents set their PIN themselves in the parent portal; there is no shared code and no default code to forget to change. The kiosk is signed out of your management account, so a parent standing at the tablet can only see their own children and cannot reach invoices, settings or other families.

Staff can also take the register from their own login, which is useful for the first weeks while families are still setting PINs. The daily attendance report lists every check-in and check-out with times and the collecting adult, and it can be exported as a CSV file for your own records. Our attendance page goes into kiosk set-up in more detail.

Parents ask the same handful of questions at collection time: how much do I owe, did my transfer arrive, are you closed on the bank holiday, what is my code again. A parent portal works when it answers those questions faster than asking a person.

In DCare.app each parent signs in with the email address you hold for them. They see their open invoices and total balance, every past invoice with its lines, the payments recorded against them, and the messages you have sent to their family or to everyone. They can set or change their check-in PIN, display their QR code, open a printable copy of any invoice and download a copy of the data held about their family.

Messages are written in DCare.app and kept with a date, so there is one record of what was said about a closure or a change of fees instead of a trail across personal phones. You can send to one family or to all families at once. Parents read messages in their portal; DCare.app does not send text messages and is not a chat app.

Online payment collection in DCare.app is designed around Stripe, with cards and SEPA Direct Debit planned for euro accounts. That integration is not live yet. Until it is switched on for your account, parents cannot pay inside DCare.app and no payment is taken automatically. We would rather say that plainly than let you find out after inviting families.

In the meantime most nurseries continue to receive fees the way they do now, usually by bank transfer. When money arrives, the nursery owner can record it against the invoice as an offline payment, choosing bank transfer, cash or cheque and the date it was received. That marks the invoice as paid, shows the payment in the parent's history and adds a receipt section to the printable invoice. Recording a payment only updates the ledger; it never moves money.

The billing page and the parent portal both say clearly when online payment is not set up, so parents are not invited to press a button that does nothing.

A nursery holds sensitive information about children and families, and in Europe that information falls under the General Data Protection Regulation. Choosing the Europe region in DCare.app changes currency, date and time formats. It does not, by itself, make your nursery compliant with GDPR or any national law, and no software can promise that on your behalf.

Your nursery remains the controller of the data you enter. You still need a privacy notice for parents, a lawful basis for what you collect, a retention policy, and appropriate agreements with any processors you use. DCare.app helps in practical ways: it only asks for the data it needs to bill and register children, staff accounts cannot see billing, the kiosk cannot reach other families, and both owners and parents can download a complete export of the data in a structured JSON file. Invoices, payments and attendance are also available as CSV.

Our own privacy notice explains what we process as a provider, and is honest about operator details that are still being finalised.

Rules on what a valid invoice must contain differ between countries, and childcare is treated differently for VAT in different places. Some nurseries are exempt, some are not registered, and some need specific wording or identifiers on every document. DCare.app does not decide any of this for you.

Invoices in DCare.app are operational billing records: they carry a number, the family, the period, issue and due dates, each line and the total in the account currency. The printable version can be saved as a PDF from the browser. They do not add VAT, tax identifiers or statutory wording automatically. If your country or your accountant requires those on fee invoices, check before relying on DCare.app documents as tax invoices.

A small nursery can usually move across in a single session. Work through these steps in order and you will be ready to issue your first invoices the same week.

1. 1
   Create the nursery. Sign up, choose the Europe region, your time zone, closing time and plan. The trial runs for 14 days with no card.
2. 2
   Enter families and children. Add each family with parent names and emails, then each child with date of birth, fee and frequency.
3. 3
   Set billing preferences. Choose a billing day for monthly fees, a late-collection fee if you charge one, and sibling discounts where they apply.
4. 4
   Invite staff. Invite practitioners by email so they can take the register and message parents without access to billing.
5. 5
   Open the kiosk. Launch kiosk mode on a tablet near the door, and ask parents to set their PIN from the portal invitation.
6. 6
   Generate the first invoices. Run invoices for the current period, check them, and tell parents where to find them.

It is a good fit if you run one nursery or creche, care for up to around sixty children, bill families in euro on a weekly or monthly fee, and want to replace a spreadsheet and a paper register with something parents can actually use. It works on any modern browser, so there is nothing to install, and the kiosk runs on an ordinary tablet.

It is not a good fit if you need learning journals or photo updates for parents, manage several sites, need automated funding claims, or want a full staff management system. Being clear about that saves you a migration you would later reverse. If you are unsure, the trial is the honest test: set up a handful of families and run one billing period side by side with your current method.