Oakfield Nursery School prioritise cashless payments and paper-free parent engagement

Award-winning nursery, Oakfield Nursery School in Altrincham, place great emphasis on staying in touch with their parent community. With a focus on streamlining communications and simplifying payments, the team decided to go cashless and paperless with online parent engagement and have taken back hours of precious time with a little help from ParentMail. 

Now collecting parent payments online with +Pay, the team are saving lots of time every week on time-consuming admin tasks. Items such as deposits, extra days, trips and other ad hoc items are now purchased online with +Pay. With a dedicated mobile app, parents pay quickly and easily with debit, credit card or PayPal; as a result, nursery staff have noticed a much speedier response from parents! 

“We no longer have to spend hours matching receipts up to invoices or make trips to the bank,” says Oakfield Nursery School Bursar, Roz Swarbrick. “+Pay also generates all invoices for us, which used to be another time-consuming manual process. Overdue invoices are made clear in the system and +Pay makes it quick and easy to forward them onto the relevant parents as a friendly reminder of payments due.” 

Oakfield Nursery School is also making the most of +Pay’s online shop facility to sell uniforms. With orders placed through the app, there’s no need for paper forms or cash. Parents simply place an order, pay online in moments and collect items during the morning drop-off. 

“For us, online payments offer security in more ways than one.” Says Roz. “Payments are received in advance, straight into our chosen bank account, which means there’s no need to chase parents for overdue payments. We also have no cash on-site, or trips to the bank. All in all, online payments have improved security for us in lots of ways.” 

Like many busy nurseries, the team at Oakfield often have plenty of news and information to share with parents. As well as going completely cashless, the nursery has also made the move to paperless communications with Online Forms and Messaging. 

“Parents use the same mobile app to manage payments and stay up to date with communications from our team.” Says Oakfield Nursery School Director, Roisin Moriarty. “We use the platform to share guidance and instructions on applying for Early Years Funding; it’s a very efficient way for us to support parents. We used to print paper letters to send this information home. For parents, online communications are far more convenient.” 

“We also use the Online Forms platform to securely collect and manage parent data. By going paperless and taking our parent engagement online, we’re not only saving precious hours but also saving money on staff time and resource, too.” 

For Oakfield Nursery School, payments and parent engagement are effort-free and painless. If your nursery could use a hand to reduce time-consuming admin and take the cash out of payments, get in touch; we’d love to show you around!