Director’s guide
Excel or nursery management software: which to choose?
Many nurseries in Morocco start with an Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheet: it is free, familiar, and it works at first. The real question isn’t whether Excel is good, but how long it will be enough for your nursery.
Updated
What Excel does well
- The list of children and families
- Simple tracking of monthly fees, with totals
- Calculations and tables your own way
- It is free, or already installed
Where Excel reaches its limits
- The file is on a computer, rarely at the entrance when children arrive
- Parents have no access to it: they call to find out
- One deleted formula or one badly copied row, and the totals are wrong
- No notifications, no photos, no record of the child’s day
- Children’s data goes round in a file sent by email or copied onto a USB stick, even though it is personal data protected by Law 09-08
The comparison, need by need
| Need | Excel spreadsheet | Nursery software (Hi Kiddo) |
|---|---|---|
| List of children | Yes | Yes, with the full record: allergies, authorized people, documents |
| Attendance | Entered after the fact | Checked in on the phone, parents notified |
| The child’s day | No | Meals, nap, photos, sent to parents |
| Monthly fees | A table to keep up to date | PDF invoices, payments, late payments flagged automatically |
| Parent access | No | A free app for them |
| Cost | Free | A subscription for the nursery, free trial |
Signs it is time to switch
- Several people need to update the same file
- You copy the same information into several places
- Parents call to find out whether their child has eaten or slept
- Late payments are discovered late
- You can’t find out who collected a child on a given day
Moving from Excel to software without losing everything
Start from your file to enter the classes, the children and the parents’ email addresses. Choose a quiet time, before the school year starts or at the beginning of a month, and keep the old file as an archive.
What if you keep both?
That’s possible: the software for day-to-day work, the spreadsheet for your accounts. In Hi Kiddo, the list of children and attendance can be exported as CSV, a file that opens in Excel.
Frequently asked questions
Is there an Excel template for managing a nursery?
There are plenty online. Check that it covers at least emergency contacts, allergies, attendance and monthly fees. For the daily log, our printable template is free.
Can you export your data from software to Excel?
With Hi Kiddo, yes: the list of children and attendance can be exported as CSV, and invoices can be downloaded as PDF.
How much does nursery management software cost?
Hi Kiddo’s price depends on the number of children enrolled. You can try it free, with no bank card, before deciding.