Software for the day nursery that has to add up every day.

Running a day nursery is a chain of things that all have to add up at once. The group has to be filled but not overfilled, the ratio has to hold at every moment, invoices have to go out and parents want to know how the day went. Below are the four things a nursery needs from its software that a general administration package will not give you.

The three-hour rule: not whether you deviated, but whether you can show it

If you are open ten hours or more you may deviate from the staff-to-child ratio at fixed moments — at most three hours a day, not consecutively, at times recorded in your pedagogical policy plan.

That is an agreement rather than a licence, and at an inspection the question is not the deviation itself but whether your rosters match what you wrote down. Anyone who has those moments only in the policy plan and not in their scheduling cannot show it. Record the times and make sure your system knows them, and that question is answered in one screen.

An inspector asks about one moment, not about your week

The question is rarely "how did that month go". It is who was on the floor on a specific Wednesday afternoon at quarter past two, and which children were there.

An average is no answer to that. You need the day as it actually was: who genuinely stood there, not who you had rostered. That difference is exactly where a spreadsheet you overwrite every week falls short — not because you did anything wrong, but because the evidence no longer exists.

The worst case is a child collected without anyone pressing the button. On paper that child is inside until midnight, and because the ratio takes the worst moment of the day, that forgotten check-out becomes your worst moment from then on. Close your days and the problem does not arise.

Mixed-age groups are where the sum gets hard

The ratios themselves are straightforward: one member of staff per three babies up to twelve months, per five children aged one to two, per six aged two to three, per eight aged three to four.

With a single age in the room that is easy arithmetic. In a mixed-age group babies sit beside toddlers, and then you do not add the ratios separately: you work out what fraction of a member of staff each child claims and add those fractions up. An eight-month-old weighs a third, a three-year-old an eighth.

And that sum shifts all day — at every check-in, every shift change, and at midnight with every birthday. A child turning twelve months moves from one-in-three to one-in-five without anyone entering anything.

Several groups side by side

With two or more groups a second question appears: does it add up per group, and does it add up across the location. A group running tight while there is room down the hall is a different problem from a location that is structurally thin, and you do not want to see them mixed together.

Rupsje calculates per group and shows it per group, with a location total underneath. Staff see only the children at the locations they work at; not a setting to remember, but how the system is built.

And when you switch: watch the dates of birth

In most administrations a date of birth is something you enter and then leave alone. Here it is a quantity you calculate with: it decides which age band a child falls into and therefore what that child weighs in the ratio.

A date that lands a year out during an import puts that child in the wrong band. Your ratio is then wrong, your dashboard says it is right, and you find out at an inspection. So after a switch, do not only check that every child is present — check that the age distribution per group matches what you carry in your head.

What we do not do

We do not support out-of-school care or toddler playgroups. If you offer those alongside your nursery, Rupsje is probably not the right choice — and we would rather say so now than after the migration.