Aurrum Kids is a childcare and preschool provider across New South Wales and Victoria. With approximately one hundred permanent employees and 20 casual employees, they care for around 300 children per day across their Mornington, Ballarat and Penrith centres.
While their primary service is early education and care, Aurrum Kids is particularly focused on community partnership programs and connecting parents with services within their local area, such as speech pathologists, dentists and local schools.
Established in 2021, Aurrum Kids is already looking towards future growth, according to Executive Director, Brodie Tebbutt.
“Despite our organisation being only 18 months old, we have established a strong operating methodology with the adoption of technology and best in market software partners.” said Brodie
“Although,” he adds, “Most providers these days are having to head in that direction to remain competitive and compliant, whilst continuing to provide the best customer and employee experience.”
The all-in-one software solution that just works
When Aurrum Kids set up the business, they were looking for an end-to-end, Childcare Centre Management System (CCMS) solution.
Brodie explains:
“In child care, we need three key pieces of software:
- A childcare Customer Relationship Management (CRM) type software, to manage our enrolled and prospective families
- A CCMS which is the childcare management software managing payments, accounts and government subsidies
- And a documentation tool to communicate with families, share photos and child updates, etc. “
Brodie advised there are limited solutions that provide this in the market which was a driving factor for the partnership with Kinder m8.
Seamless payments
Kinder m8’s software is fully integrated with Ezidbit’s all-in-one payments solution. Aurrum Kids found this feature particularly attractive.
“Within the Aurrum Kids team there are people who have experience with different CCMS software platforms. There are certain things that Kinder m8 does really well that other software providers can’t do. And a lot of that functionality is around processing of fees, discounts adjustments, additional subsidy funding etc. That’s where this platform is strong – in the processing and connection between government systems and the management software. It’s quite seamless.
“We’re a cashless business due to a recent regulatory change requiring all providers to take payment electronically. Out of our 300 families, around 10 pay us directly because of their work arrangements. We have almost a 98% adoption rate of payers via Ezidebit so it works well for almost all families.”
Payment automation has also worked well for the business.
“Other software providers require you to manually enter adjustments on accounts as you go through your payment cycle, each week or fortnight. Kinder m8 allows us to set that up in advance, put it on recurring frequency, set date periods and it processes automatically. We can also run reports on any discounts to understand over a period of time what that impact might be to the family or the business. That is an improvement that has worked really well for our organisation.” said Brodie.
Customer service
Aurrum Kids recently did some work on customer experience to understand the end-to-end process from first enquiry point, right through to exit, which is ideally graduation when the children are five or six.
“Customer service is important for us. We know we’re a small provider relative to the sector, but Kinder m8 has been a great supporter in developing a product that addresses our business needs. We have monthly partnership meetings with Kinder m8 where we cover our user experience, software and development updates, and maintain connection.”
On the payments side, Brodie has also been happy with support provided by Ezidebit. “If we have ever had questions around the Ezidebit process, the support team at Ezidebit have always been accessible. Whenever I’ve had interaction with the team it’s always been positive.”
User friendly
Another thing that has impressed Brodie with Kinder m8 is the product’s progressive user interface.
“There’s some software in this sector that is not being reinvested in to update the product. So that impacts the user interface for clients of that product, and what the parents are experiencing. We need the software to complement how we communicate with families and how we connect our brand. How that presents on the other side is important.”
Similarly, another feature that has worked well is the gateway to the government portals directly into the Kinder m8 system.
“The gateway connection allows us to submit requests in Kinder m8 which talks to the government, we then get paid as an operator for it, and you can report back as required. It’s really seamless, which has not always been the case when it comes to processing and managing accounts in this sector.”
Positive outcomes
The biggest positive outcome from Brodie’s perspective is the time that has been saved through automation, setting scheduled payments and seamless integration of systems.
“As we work through that end-to-end process flow, it allows for automation of payments and quick reporting on follow-ups needed, without dampening the family or user experience. It provides for really quick data entry for additional subsidy payments that might need to come through the gateway with the government orders. And that, over a period of a year with multiple services, is material.”