Configure your core center infrastructure, ratio limits, and facility settings. Learn how to set up age groups, staff ratios, classrooms or spaces, programs, locations, and internal task lists, while managing system customizations and policy agreements for digital parent sign-off.

Set Up: System Configurations

How to Set Up Groups

How to Set Up Locations

How to Set Up Programs

How to Set Up Transport Groups & Schools

How to Set Up Catalog Items

How to Set Up Tasks

How to Set Up the Age Group Categories

How to Set Up Ratios

How to Set Up Agreements & Policies for Parent Sign Off

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Welcome to ChildFriendly Pro! Step-by-step onboarding, data migration, and staff training courses to help you launch smoothly. Learn how to complete your initial setup overview, log in, transfer data and historical family balances from your old software, add admin users, authorize shared educator devices, adjust your attendance layout, and access essential training articles to fully prepare your staff and families for success.

Getting Started & Training

This document explains how to log in to your ChildFriendly account for the first time, review your hours, configure notification and messaging preferences, change your temporary password, and log out securely.

How to Log In, Set Up Your Profile & Notifications

This document explains how to view, filter, create, and edit administrative users in the ChildFriendly platform, including how to assign roles, centers, and manage access for staff with admin permissions.

How to Add Admin Users

Device authorization is a crucial security feature that ensures staff can only access the app from approved devices, protecting sensitive family information from being accessed on personal phones. This document explains how administrators can authorize a device (such as a classroom iPad) to use the ChildFriendly app. It also covers how to optionally allow specific staff members to access your center’s account from their personal devices.

How to Authorize Shared Educator Devices

This document explains how to import existing family, student, and staff records into ChildFriendly using the built-in import templates. You can download the appropriate template, prepare your data, and then upload it into the system so members appear in their respective modules.

How to Transfer Your Data to ChildFriendly

To ensure a smooth and successful rollout of ChildFriendly, we have created this Launch Training and Resouce Guide. To begin, we recommend dividing staff training into two focused sessions and then after such training is complete, introduce ChildFriendly to your families.

How to Introduce ChildFriendly to your Staff & Families

When switching to ChildFriendly from another system, it’s essential to set accurate starting balances for each family to ensure a clean transition. This guide walks you and your accountant through how to enter outstanding debits or credits, as of your chosen start date, allowing you to begin financial tracking within ChildFriendly without discrepancies.

How to Enter Beginning Family Balances when Switching to ChildFriendly

Resources and orientation guides built specifically for families using the Parent App. Get started with quick walkthroughs, set up app notifications and auto-payments, download childcare tax receipts, use instant messaging, view daily journals, sign off on incidents, report absences, and manage digital sign-in/sign-out.

Parent Support Hub

Welcome to ChildFriendly! This quick, 5-minute video walkthrough and guide covers everything you need to know as a parent—from checking your child in to managing tuition payments and messaging teachers.

Parent Orientation in Under 5 Minutes

Before going through this guide, ensure you have first watched the video or read the guide on how to set up your ChildFriendly account. This training guide will teach you how to use the ChildFriendly parent app, including how to view your child's registration, daily activities, and payment information. You can also add or edit necessary information including allergies, medications, and food restrictions. Payments, billing, and tax slips are readily accessed here.

Parent App Full 'How to...' Orientation Guide

This guide will show you how to ensure you are receiving ChildFriendly notifications from your child's center, on your mobile device.

How to Turn on App Notifications- Parent Edition

This quick guide will outline how to report an absence for your child from daycare or preschool. You can also report an absence for school pick-up. You can this for a single day such as illness, or for a period of time, such as a vacation.

How to Report Your Child's Absence- Parent Edition

This guide outlines how to use the Journals module in the Parent Portal to stay connected with your child's daily activities. It ensures parents can view real-time updates, acknowledge reports, and filter through specific incident or health records seamlessly.

How to View Your Child's Journal & Sign Off On Incidents- Parent Edition

This guide is for parents looking to view and download their child's tax receipt. A tax receipt will be issued after any payment is made, so that this receipt can be downloaded at any time.

How to Download Your Childcare Tax Receipt- Parent Edition

Learn how to use the parent portal’s instant messaging feature for communicating with your child’s daycare. Depending on the center’s settings, you will be able to contact both room teachers and admin, or only admin.

How to Use Instant Messaging- Parent Edition

This document outlines how to set up and manage your childcare payment methods in the ChildFriendly parent app, including pre-authorized bank debits and, where allowed, credit card payments.

How to Set Up Auto-Payments- Parent Edition

This guide explains how staff can set up the attendance kiosk on a tablet, and how family members use their unique PIN codes to sign children in (Drop-Off) and out (Pick-Up) at the center.

💡 Note: This feature is optional and only applies to centers that have enabled the Parent Kiosk. Many centers prefer to have staff manage attendance and sign children in directly, rather than having parents use a front-desk tablet.

How to Sign Your Child In and Out of the Center

Your daily operational hub. Learn how to use specialized dashboard features to track admin attendance, manage meals and RSVPs, monitor enrollment and expiries, handle info change requests, and securely log medications or approve health and incident journals.

Dashboard Module Help

This document explains how administrators can access and manage information changes submitted by families in the ChildFriendly dashboard, including member info, payment info, and student profile updates.

How to Manage the Info Changes Tab

This document explains how admin staff can use the Dashboard Admin Attendance features in ChildFriendly to monitor and approve invalid sign-outs and overtime, and review detailed attendance records.

How to Use the Dashboard's Admin Attendance Features

This document explains how to use the Enrollment area of the ChildFriendly dashboard to manage onboarding students, ending enrollments, and waitlisted children. It covers viewing and filtering records, tracking onboarding tasks, configuring custom fields, completing or denying enrollments, and updating waitlist details.

How to Use the Enrollment Dashboard

This guide provides instructions for room educators to effectively use the ChildFriendly dashboard to manage scheduled medications.

How Educators Administer Regular Meds

This document explains how users can access and use the RSVP tab to view and manage child absences, including filtering records and adding new absences from a child’s profile.

How to Use the RSVP Feature

This document explains how users can access and use the Meals tab to review children’s food restrictions and meal services, and how to filter this information by group, meal type, and meal adjustments.

How to Use the Meals Tab

This document explains how admins can review, approve or reject health and incident journals, view historical records, and enable digital acknowledgements from parents or guardians in ChildFriendly.

How to Approve Health and Incident Journals

Use the Expiries section within the Dashboard module to view and manage upcoming expiry dates for staff and students, including police checks, reviews, medications, grants, subsidy approvals, and immunizations. This feature is available to admin users and provides flexible date ranges, filters, and CSV export options for efficient follow-up.

How to Use the Expiries Dashboard

Your central hub for roster management and enrollment workflows. Learn how to navigate the Families module, manually add child and family profiles, upload photos, filter current families, and update primary account members. Plus, get step-by-step guides on customizing online registration forms with custom questions, finding your shareable registration link, managing your waitlist, and setting up drop-in programs.

Families Module & Registration

This document provides a concise orientation to the Families module, explaining each column, how to use filters, and how to quickly check registration, onboarding, and financial compliance for children and their families.

How to Navigate the Families Module

In this guide, you’ll learn how to quickly move children between your Onboarding Enrollment list and your Waitlist. This will help you stay organized and keep track of who’s waiting for a spot, even on your busiest days.

How to Add or Remove Children from the Waitlist

This process explains how to locate the registration form for your center, and then either embed it on your website or share it directly with families via a link.

How to Find the Registration Link to Share on Your Website

In this guide, you’ll learn how to review a child’s pending registration, confirm their spot, handle deposits or waitlists, and see how their future program moves and rates are planned. This will help you quickly move families from “applied” to “ready for their first day,” even when you’ve got little ones keeping you busy.

How to Add and Edit a Registration Record

In this guide, you’ll see exactly what parents experience when they register a child online, and how you then confirm and manage that registration in your system. This helps you keep enrollments organized, payments set up, and children smoothly moved into the right rooms and programs without extra manual work.

How to Complete the Registration Process

This document explains how parents (and admins using a parent view) can upload and add a child’s photo to their profile, using either a computer or a phone.

How to Upload Children's Photos (Admin & Parent View)

This document explains how to use the Status filter in the Families module to display only current students, as well as how to filter by other status options such as Pending or Future.

How to Filter the Families Tab to Show Only Current Families

Your complete administrative toolkit for team management and security. Learn how to navigate the Staff module, add new educators or employees, securely manage employee records using the Staff Digital Filing Cabinet, and handle access control by resetting or revoking staff passwords.

Staff Module Help

In this guide, you’ll learn how to open a staff member’s digital filing cabinet and keep their documents neatly organized in folders. This will help you quickly find things like contracts and meeting notes, even on your busiest days.

How to Use the Staff Digital Filing Cabinet

This document explains how to reset a staff member’s password when they are unable to access their account, and how to revoke their login access when they should no longer be able to sign in.

How to Reset or Revoke Staff Passwords

Follow this comprehensive guide to add a staff member in ChildFriendly, organize their employment information, set up access, and manage their documentation effectively.

How to Add a Staff Member + Staff Module Overview

Your central hub for center-wide notifications and messaging channels. Learn how to distribute mass emails, utilize the shared calendar feature for event scheduling, and manage instant messaging threads between room ECEs, administrators, staff, and families. Plus, review access control settings to understand who can view and participate in instant messaging threads.

Communicate Module Help

Use the Email feature in ChildFriendly to efficiently communicate with staff and families by composing messages, managing recipients with filters, reviewing history, handling delayed emails, and configuring email signatures.

How to Send Emails

This document explains how to use the ChildFriendly Communicate module’s calendar for planning staff events, family events, menu planning and more. We also review how to manage group access, notifications, recurring events, and calendar sharing.

How to Use the Calendar Feature

This document explains how administrators can enable and use instant messaging and announcements within the childcare platform. You will learn how to turn on parent–room staff messaging, view and respond to messages, send new messages to families and staff, apply filters, and create announcements for larger groups.

How to Instant Message- Admin to Staff & Families

As a Room Educator, you can use the instant messaging and announcements features to communicate efficiently with parents, portal members, co-workers, and admin. This process covers how to open and navigate the messaging area, search and filter conversations, compose new messages to individuals or groups, and send announcements to larger audiences.

How to Instant Message- Room ECEs to Admin & Families

This guide provides a clear overview of who can see communications within the instant messaging platform. It is designed to help staff and administrators understand message visibility, group-level oversight, and how access to specific conversation threads is granted or removed based on staff assignments and sign-in status.

Who Can Access Instant Messaging Threads?

Your comprehensive master blueprint for documenting and sharing daily student activities. Learn how to fully navigate the Journal module to create daily logs, share photos and activity updates with families, track child milestones, and send real-time classroom updates directly to parents.

Journal Module Help

Use the ChildFriendly journal module to document children’s daily activities, learning, health, incidents, and other important information, and to share appropriate updates with parents, caregivers, and internal staff.

How to Use the Journal Module- Complete Guide

Configure your core billing infrastructure, payment gateways, and accounting software syncs. Learn how to set up payment processing, establish regular fee rates, manage catalog items or meal adjustments, set payroll preferences, sync with QuickBooks, and configure third-party sponsors or regional grant parameters like Alberta Affordability Grant rate caps.

Set Up: Financial Configurations

Setting Up Payment Processing

How to Set Up Third Party Sponsors

How to Set Up Adjustments, Including Meals Services

How to Set Up Regular Fee Rates

How to Set Up Rate Rollovers

How to Archive, Delete, and Restore Rates

How to Set Up Rate Caps for Alberta Affordability Grants

How to Set Up Payroll Preferences

A step-by-step guide to connecting QuickBooks to ChildFriendly so you can automate your financial tracking and seamlessly sync your accounting data.

How to Sync to QuickBooks

Your go-to spot for instant troubleshooting and quick answers. Find rapid solutions for password resets, login difficulties, account management, and common platform tips to help you resolve issues on the spot.

Frequently Asked Questions

Once your Stripe account is set up through ChildFriendly, you can manage your financial and business details directly via the Stripe Express portal. This self-serve access ensures your center remains audit-ready and your billing information stays current without administrative delays.

How to Update Your Information in Stripe for Credit Card Processing

This document explains how ChildFriendly pricing works, including plans, per-transaction fees, fee pass-through options, and how to get started. It uses a simple $400 invoice example to show exactly what you and parents pay in different scenarios.

ChildFriendly Pricing Guide

The Parent Portal gives families access to important features like student profiles, payments, attendance, and registration. However, what each person can see or do in the portal depends on whether they are marked as the Primary Member in their ChildFriendly profile and if one of the Other Members also has a Portal Account. This article outlines the different permission levels for each type of portal user, so your team and families know what to expect based on their role.

What can parents and family members see and do in the portal?

ChildFriendly is designed to simplify your digital life by allowing you to manage multiple accounts from a single email address. This article will guide you through the various scenarios where one email can be used for different roles and locations.

How do I manage multiple portal accounts with a single email?

When using Pre-Authorized Debit (PAD) in ChildFriendly, the timing of withdrawals and deposits depends on when you process the payment in the system. Below is a breakdown to help you plan and manage cash flow effectively.

How long do PAD payments take to process?

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