💳 Electronic Payments - Manage Cash Flow

Today’s Issue: Parents No Longer Reading to Kids?, Win Fun Swag!, Tapping Into Electronic Payments, ECE News, = 1.5 cups of coffee.

Want Me to Read to My Kids?! Meh 😒: Looks like parents no longer like reading to their kids per a recent survey. For reals. Only 40% of parents with children aged 0 to 13 agreed that “reading books to my child is fun for me.” This is down from 64% in 2012. These trends are concerning to say the least. We all know just how important this is for developing young minds. I guess playing Wordle may be more important. But then again, you have to learn those words from somewhere, like, oh I don’t know, reading? Your ECE influence just got that much more important…

Refer the Ecential to Win Some Swag!

We wanted to create a fun raffle to win a sweet Ecential coffee tumbler! ☕️ It’s our way to say thanks and kick off the summer! It’s super easy. You have your own referral link that tracks how many times you share the newsletter. Each share acts as an entry into a raffle. Then we will have a weekly drawing to announce a lucky winner!

Here is what you need to do:

• Click on this button to share the newsletter: Share The Ecential

• Click “Copy” to get your own link to track referrals

• Then share your link via email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Insta or wherever

👉 Pro Tip! Share with your whole center to get a bunch of referrals easily. Have multiple centers? Share across your entire organization!

💸 Why Every Childcare Center Should Require Digital Payments

If you study successful ECE businesses, two traits stand out: they make decisions based on data, and they automate tuition collection. Before we get into some more details, we would love to share some of our thoughts with you in our first video post on this topic.

Chasing tuition is one of the most time-consuming and costly activities a center can take on. Between follow-up emails, awkward conversations, and bounced checks, collecting payments manually eats into hours that could be spent improving programs or supporting staff. The solution? Automate it.

The only way to avoid the inefficiencies of chasing payments is to require families to enroll in automatic payments—and that starts with making electronic payments mandatory. We know this sounds scary. 😨

We understand that digital payments come with processing fees. But smart business owners know these fees are far less costly than the alternative: bad debt, inconsistent cash flow, and the administrative burden of collecting late or missed payments. Did you know, that according to the National Child Care Association, the average center writes off 2–5% of annual tuition revenue as uncollected bad debt a year!! That’s a lot to leave on the table. 🙈

There’s also a human benefit. Requiring automatic payments eliminates uncomfortable conversations with families. No more reminders, no more apologies, and no more stress over unpaid tuition.

Here’s what making the switch to digital payments can do for your center:

• Streamline your cash flow

• Eliminate bad debt

• Improve staff and parent relationships

As for processing fees, don't view them as an added cost—view them as a cost of doing business in the modern world. But, you have options: build a small percentage (we recommend around 3%) into your tuition rates, or charge a modest administrative fee to cover the expense.

Our philosophy? Make it as easy as possible to get paid. Whatever route you choose, the key is consistency: require auto-pay, use digital payments, and have a clear policy that ensures your center doesn’t absorb the cost of inefficiency.

👉👉👉 Want to estimate the impact for your center? We created a business case that outlines what this might look like. Take a look at our blog post here!

Quick Reader Poll!

Procare Promotion!

Procare Solutions is sponsoring The Ecential for May & June. During these months we are focused on content related to leveraging technology (specifically a CCMS) in ECE and the team at Procare wants to help our readers. Through June, Procare will be offering 3 months FREE! So when exploring CCMS solutions, be sure to check them out!

🤣 Kids Are Funny

This little piece was sent to us by a reader and we had to share! 🙊

ECE in the News:

🪓 More Possible Cuts to Preschool Funding: Yikes. It’s not the headline we like to hear. But the recent budget proposals at the Federal level are looking to cut preschool development grants $315 million. Good thing we have seen ongoing commitment from the states to ensure preschools are getting the dollars they need.

🧾 Building a Regional Presence: First Learning, with 15 centers in the Rochester and Buffalo areas, announced the acquisition of the Windsor Academy childcare center in New Windsor, New York. This is a continuation of market consolidation of schools in regional areas across the United States. There is a lot of activity around building large scale operations and standardizing care.

Quick Reader Poll!

The Internet is a Playground:

🗓️ On this Day in History: We tend to forget about the little things we take for granted. Including jeans. In 1873, Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis receive patent for blue jeans. Who would have thought that such a small invention would revolutionize the clothing industry.

🏈 Oh My Gosh, Oh My Gosh!: ESPN finally unveiled the name of its new streaming service. Wait for it, it’s…..ESPN. I wonder who the genius was behind that one.

🦾 Robots That Feel Touch: Amazon just developed a new robot that can feel touch. Sounds weird, right? Amazon’s 1 million workers may soon be outnumbered by the 750,000 robots. We wonder if they’ll need to add more bubble wrap to the Amazon packages.

🚃 You Shall Not Pass: Looks like cats can stop trains!

YOUR VOICE COUNTS

Is there a topic you want more info on or want to share a funny story? Then let us know! Shoot us a quick email at [email protected]. This newsletter is for you, and well, you should have a say, don't you think?