There’s an interesting trend that has emerged in Singapore’s childcare sector—a strong inclination towards technology, driven by a predominantly young population of parents and teachers alike. This demographic of tech-savvy parents and staff creates an ideal environment for school management systems that can plug in seamlessly.
Let’s dive into what makes a school management system stand out in the diverse, dynamic environment of Singapore’s childcare sector, and help you choose the right one for you.
BONUS – Get a free comparison table to help make your decision for the best school management systems in Singapore – it’s at the end of the blog!
illumine
Since its launch, illumine has rapidly gained popularity and is now used by over 1000 centres worldwide. Its expansive feature set is one of the most comprehensive among childcare management software solutions.
With a sleek and user-friendly interface, illumine streamlines every facet of childcare centre operations. The platform manages new inquiries with efficiency, supports the delivery of high-quality curriculum with insightful observations from teachers, enhanced by an AI assistant, and meticulously tracks students’ learning and development
illumine ensures meticulous attendance tracking through secure digital check-ins, enhances safety with customizable protocols for student pick-up and simplifies billing processes with features like automated invoicing and payment tracking.
Childcare lead management system
If you are looking to boost enrolments at your centre, illumine helps you manage your admissions pipeline, simplify the enrolment process, and facilitate easy transfer of student data, plus a lead management system.
It captures leads from various sources like walk-ins, WhatsApp, your website, and even Facebook. It automates emails and tasks for the admissions team, ensuring thorough follow-up and engagement with prospective parents. Each lead’s activities are tracked, providing valuable insights for personalized communication.
The system also streamlines waitlist management to optimise enrollment capacities and simplifies the student transfer process with an easy document migration feature, making student admissions smooth and hassle-free.
Learning and assessment tools
illumine offers a transformative approach to early childhood education with customizable tools that cater to your centre’s pedagogy. It simplifies the tracking and reporting of each child’s progress, and generates detailed reports and updates. These insights are invaluable for internal assessments and keep parents regularly informed about their child’s academic journey.
Additionally, illumine’s AI assistant makes lesson planning and assessment far more efficient and easy. It helps educators create effective lesson plans in a fraction of the time, reducing the workload for teaching staff. It also enables teachers to record high-quality observations, accelerating providing a detailed view of each child’s development.
One-click portfolio generation addresses the challenge of documenting and showcasing individual student growth. Teachers can easily generate comprehensive portfolios of each child’s work and milestones with a single click, facilitating better parent-teacher communication and student assessment.
Childcare fees and billing platform
illumine offers comprehensive billing and accounting software that brings significant benefits to childcare centres. This system integrates all financial interactions into a single, user-friendly app, providing a convenient one-stop solution for parents. It supports multiple payment methods including credit/debit cards and ACH transfers, and accommodates all major currencies to simplify the billing process.
From generating invoices to processing payments via methods like GIRO and PayNow, illumine simplifies the financial dealings of childcare centres. This integration helps with maintaining accuracy and efficiency in financial management, making it an asset for accountants and financial managers.
Additionally, the platform’s functionalities like custom invoicing, recurring invoices, auto payments, and automatic reminders significantly reduce the administrative burden. Detailed financial reporting, including tax receipts and payment tracking, ensures a comprehensive and transparent overview of the centre’s financial health. illumine also allows for effortless synchronization of financial data with popular accounting software like QuickBooks, Gusto, and Tally.
Parent communication for childcare centres
illumine simplifies and strengthens the communication process between parents and childcare centres. Parents can enjoy prompt and detailed daily updates on children’s activities, meals, nap times, and diaper changes.
These updates keep parents informed about their child’s experiences, which is particularly helpful for younger children that can’t communicate yet. This not only reassures parents but also helps build a transparent relationship between the centre and families. Through in-app messaging, parents can easily raise concerns, share notes, and inform about absences, and more.
Plus, any queries or concerns from parents can be escalated to the relevant staff, creating an environment of open communication and responsiveness.
Safety and security features
illumine’s comprehensive approach to security ensures that childcare centres can keep children safe and parents in the loop on their whereabouts. Geofencing establishes virtual boundaries around your childcare centre, enabling real-time alerts when a child enters or leaves the premises.
Bus tracking extends safety measures to transportation, allowing parents and centres to track the real-time location of the school bus. This ensures that children are safely transported from home to the centre and back, with parents staying informed about the bus’s location and arrival times.
CCTV integration allows for surveillance of the centre’s premises, contributing to a secure environment for children. This integration offers peace of mind to both parents and staff by enabling live monitoring and recording of activities, ensuring any concerns can be promptly addressed.
illumine also enables automated notifications to parents, ensuring they are always informed when their child checks in or out of the centre. Each of these features plays a crucial role in ensuring a secure environment for children throughout their day at the centre.
illumine has a collection of excellent reviews and case studies – such as this Hong Kong-based centre that grew their enrolment by 3x.
Managing multiple centres
Managing multiple childcare centres involves significant monitoring and often leads to complex manual tracking, making it challenging to maintain consistency and efficiency across all locations. Administrators face the task of aggregating data, comparing performance, and ensuring each centre meets the same high standards, often resulting in a time-consuming and error-prone process.
illumine’s multi-centre dashboard addresses these pain points by offering a unified view of operations across all branches. This powerful feature allows administrators to effortlessly monitor and compare the performance of different centres from a single platform.
With just a click, you can drill down to view detailed reports for a specific centre, making it easier to identify areas for improvement, allocate resources more effectively, and implement best practices across all locations.
By eliminating the need for manual data compilation and analysis, illumine’s multi-centre dashboard streamlines oversight, enhances decision-making, and ensures a high level of quality and consistency across all childcare centres.
LittleLives
LittleLives is a school management system that is used in schools and centres primarily in Singapore and Malaysia. It offers a robust and intuitive set of features that make daycare operations more efficient. Let’s explore how!
Parent communication
The platform’s strengths lie in its ability to enable efficient communication through digital newsletters and real-time notifications. These tools are crucial for keeping parents engaged and informed. However, when juxtaposed with illumine, LittleLives’ user interface may not be as intuitive, which could slightly hinder parent engagement.
Attendance tracking
The system simplifies attendance management with digital check-ins, similar to illumine. LittleLives offers a reliable way to monitor attendance but might lack some of the advanced notification features found in illumine. For example, if you run a multi-centre operation, you won’t be able to view attendance cumulatively across all your centres on one dashboard.
This makes LittleLives limited for use in multi-centre daycares and nurseries. Additionally, LittleLives doesn’t offer the digital identity cards or QR-code based verification that illumine does.
Admission and enrolment tools
LittleLives provides a lead form feature that can be integrated into childcare centers’ websites, streamlining the initial step of the admissions process by capturing prospective parent inquiries directly.
This functionality facilitates the collection of leads but does not extend to a full CRM system for managing the entirety of the waitlist and admissions process. In contrast, platforms like Illumine offer a more comprehensive suite of tools, including detailed CRM capabilities, that support the entire admissions journey from initial inquiry to enrollment, potentially offering a more robust solution for childcare centres looking to enhance their enrollment strategies.
Billing and accounting
LittleLives provides essential tools for handling billing and accounting, making financial management a more straightforward task. Features include accurate invoicing, efficient transaction breakdown, and customizable billing schedules. This platform also integrates toolsHowever, compared to illumine, LittleLives does not offer a comprehensive, multi-centre dashboard to track transactions and billing, an aspect vital for larger centres that require detailed financial oversight.
Qoqolo (CommonTown) Preschool Management System
Qoqolo is a Singapore-based school management system that offers a suite of apps to help manage centres more effectively.
Preschool parent communication
Qoqolo stands out with its all-encompassing parent communication tools. It provides a dynamic and intuitive platform for parents to connect with teachers, share class activities, and access learning materials.
The system includes features like announcements, class space, and calendar event booking. However, when compared to illumine’s features that include multiple types of real-time messaging, query reporting and escalation, and safety communication features like geofencing – illumine offers the more comprehensive set of features for centres in Singapore.
Attendance tracking
Qoqolo offers attendance reports and tracking, along with its other operational features. It also has capabilities for contactless temperature-checking to manage any health concerns. However, since it lacks comprehensive dashboard and analytics like illumine, it may fall short for more detailed attendance tracking requirements.
Admission and enrolment
Qoqolo simplifies the admission process with an online application system. It includes detailed tracking of each application’s status and a waitlist management feature. This aspect of their features is on par with a tool like illumine, making it an alternative that can benefit centres looking to boost enrolment.
Billing and accounting
Qoqolo’s platform includes easy billing and accounting features. It allows for various payment methods, detailed financial reporting, and customizable invoicing options, making it a robust tool for financial management.
BridgED School Management System (Cyberland)
BridgED is a web-based application that helps simplify operations for schools. It’s used by much fewer centres than illumine or LittleLives, however, it offers the essential, basic features required by a childcare centre management system in Singapore.
Parent communication
BridgED offers the functionality of blast newsletters, lets you compile RSVPs for events, and generate online surveys. Their features also include regular updates on children’s activities and milestones, ensuring that parents are well-informed and connected.
Although BridgED provides an effective communication channel, it might not offer the same level of interactive experience in real-time activity sharing as seen in illumine.
Attendance tracking
BridgED has a user-friendly attendance management system that tracks both student and staff attendance. The platform allows you to generate reports with this information for analysis.
While BridgED ensures efficient tracking, it may lack advanced security features like illumine’s QR-code based identification or facial recognition technology.
Admission and enrolment
The online application portal provided by BridgED simplifies the admission and enrolment process. This system ensures efficient handling of applications, comparable to illumine. However, BridgED might not include some of the advanced features such as CRM tools and waitlist management that are present in systems like Qoqolo and illumine.
Features like these are extremely beneficial when it comes to surviving in the competitive childcare market, and boosting enrolments to maximise your centre’s capacity.
Billing and accounting
BridgED’s finance module is specially designed for preschools, enabling easy generation and direct emailing of invoices and receipts to parents. It uniquely tracks both payments and subsidies/discounts, simplifying the handling of preschool finances.
Although BridgED offers comprehensive tools for invoicing and tracking payments, it may not provide as detailed financial reporting and analytics as illumine.
Taidii App for School Management
Taidii distinguishes itself in the preschool management software market by offering a white-labeled app solution, particularly aimed at enterprise-level brands. This approach allows childcare centres to present the app as their own, enhancing brand consistency and recognition.
However, it’s important to note that this customization comes with a trade-off: unlike platforms that continuously introduce new features and updates, Taidii’s clients should not expect regular software updates or new feature rollouts post-deployment.
Parent communication
Taidii promotes parent engagement through its Communication Book, which shares photos and videos of children’s activities, along with newsletters and announcements. Parents can also participate in surveys and activities, fostering a community atmosphere. Like illumine, Taidii provides real-time updates and direct messaging for immediate communication, although Taidii’s approach might be less instantaneous than illumine.
Attendance tracking and security
Security is a paramount feature of Taidii, with biometric measures ensuring student safety and authorized pick-ups. Its products allow school administrators to record and track vital student information like height, weight, and temperature to send parents in real-time. This level of security and innovation in attendance tracking provides peace of mind but may lack the simplicity and ease of use found in illumine’s QR code and ID card systems.
Billing and accounting
Taidii can generate customized reports for audit and compliance, including a variety of financial reports. Its finance management module is designed for easy operation, ensuring timely payments and comprehensive financial oversight.
Try illumine
We invite childcare centres in Singapore to experience firsthand the transformative impact of illumine. Book a demo and join the community of over 1000 happy centres that have already elevated their operations with illumine.
Discover how our comprehensive system can streamline your processes, boost parent engagement, and enhance the overall quality of care and education at your centre. Take this opportunity to be a part of a growing network of successful childcare centres and set a new standard in childcare management in Singapore.
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