Childcare billing software that keeps fees and families in order

A childcare service runs on a rhythm: families enquire and enrol, children attend their booked days, you invoice the fees parents owe, parents pay, and you keep everyone informed along the way. OneBookPlus supports every stage of that everyday-admin rhythm, from the first online enquiry through to the reminder that clears an overdue family balance, sitting neatly alongside whatever CCS-approved system you use for subsidy reporting.

Enquiry, waitlist and enrolment

Families find your service through Google, your website or word of mouth and submit an enquiry through your branded booking page, available around the clock, so a 9pm enquiry doesn't become a missed voicemail. New families complete a digital enrolment capturing parent and emergency contacts, authorised collectors, the child's allergies and medical notes, immunisation dates, and the days they want. When you have a place, you move them off the waitlist and into a booked schedule. Every detail lives in one family record, so when a parent calls about pick-up arrangements or an allergy, you have the answer in front of you rather than digging through a folder.

Fee invoicing and the CCS gap

Child Care Subsidy is administered by Services Australia and is submitted through a CCS-approved Child Care Software (CCS System) provider or the Provider Entry Point, that part stays in your sector platform. What parents actually pay you is the gap fee: the portion of the fee left after any subsidy. OneBookPlus is built for exactly that gap. Raise recurring fee invoices on the cycle you bill, per-session, weekly or fortnightly, apply sibling or extra-day discounts, and send each family a clear statement of what they owe. Child care provided by an approved or registered service is generally GST-free, while some incidental goods or extras can be taxable; OneBookPlus tracks GST-free and taxable lines per invoice so your records and BAS stay correct without manual sorting.

Payments and arrears

Parents pay their gap fee by card directly from the invoice link, and payments reconcile against the family's balance automatically. When an account falls overdue, gentle automated reminders go out by SMS and email, so chasing arrears stops being a stack of awkward conversations at pick-up. The arrears view shows which families are behind and by how much, so a small balance gets followed up before it becomes a large one, protecting the cash flow your service relies on. If you want to see what a run of late-paying families does to your position over a quarter, the cash flow forecast calculator lets you model it on your own numbers.

Setting fees when most of your costs are wages

Childcare is a wages business before it is anything else, and a fee set once and left alone quietly stops covering the roster. When you review your daily or sessional fee, the honest starting point is your own cost per placed child: educator wages including on-costs, rent and utilities, food and consumables, insurance and the software you run, divided across the places you can realistically fill rather than the places you have on paper. Occupancy is what moves that number most, which is why a waitlist you keep working is worth more than a small fee rise. Give families notice in writing before a fee change and put it in the enrolment agreement, because a fee increase landing without warning is one of the quickest ways to lose a booked day. The employer cost calculator gives you the true hourly cost of an educator once super and leave are counted, and the break-even calculator shows how many placed days it takes to cover a fixed cost base. Fees and subsidy are separate things: what you charge is your decision, what a family receives in subsidy is calculated by Services Australia.

Parent communications and bookings

Keeping parents informed is half the job. From one screen you can send closure notices, term dates, pupil-free-day reminders, excursion permission requests and fee notices by SMS and email, to a single family or your whole list, without printing another note for the bag. Families can request casual or vacation-care days online and add extra sessions, which feeds straight back into your schedule and billing. For OOSH and vacation-care programs especially, this turns the constant churn of casual bookings into a tidy, billable flow rather than a pile of texts.

Enrolment records an authorised nominee can rely on

The record that matters most on a bad day is not the invoice, it is the enrolment. Who is authorised to collect this child, who is the emergency contact when the parent is not answering, what is the allergy and what is the plan for it, which immunisation dates are on file, and which days is the child booked. Under the National Quality Framework those details are part of running an approved service, and the practical failure is almost never that a service did not collect them. It is that they were collected on paper at enrolment, changed by text message eight months later, and now exist in two versions. Holding them on one family record means the version at the front desk is the version the educator sees on their phone, and a change is made once. Keep the record current as families change: a new partner on the authorised collector list, a lapsed contact number, a new medical note. If you also run before and after school care, the education and training page and the tutoring business page cover the same records for term-based programs. This is administration guidance, not compliance advice: confirm your record-keeping obligations with your state or territory regulator.

Records, occupancy and growth

Growing a service comes down to filling your places and keeping the families you have. Your dashboard ties it together, bookings, enrolments, occupancy, outstanding balances and BAS-ready financials in one place, so you always know where the service stands. Your booking page doubles as a lightweight website showcasing your care types, fees and how to enquire, and waitlist and enquiry campaigns help you fill openings as they come up. Throughout, OneBookPlus keeps your enrolment records, billing, payments and parent communications in order, while your CCS-approved system handles subsidy submission, confirm your CCS and National Quality Framework obligations with Services Australia and your state/territory regulator.