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

This article explains how to create, configure, and manage centers within the Child Friendly platform at the organization level. You will learn how to add, edit, clone, and delete centers, configure payout and merchant fee settings, set up public registration redirects, and access key portal links.

How to Add Centers to your Organization

Use the Tasks category in the Organization settings (within the Setup module) to define and maintain the list of staff tasks you want to track for payroll, reporting, and grant purposes. Tasks allow you to distinguish how many hours staff spend on different activities (e.g., childcare, prep, cleaning, transportation), which can support differentiated pay rates and grant submissions tied to specific work performed.

How to Set Up Tasks

Use this process to configure the General settings for each center in your organization, including age groups, ratio rules, and schools and transport details. These settings form the foundation for programs, rates, registration rules, and attendance workflows.

How to Configure Center Ages, Ratios, Schools & Transport Groups

This article explains how to configure physical “spaces” in your center so staff and children can be accurately signed in and out for attendance, ratios, task and compliance tracking. You will complete these steps for each individual center.

How to Set Up Spaces within a Center

Use the Groups section in the Setup module to define how children are grouped for registration at your center. Groups are registration groupings (e.g., Sunbeams, Raccoons), distinct from physical spaces (e.g., Ladybugs classroom, gym). Proper setup ensures your groups align with your licensing approvals specific to your center, including, capacities, and permitted age ranges.

How to Set Up Groups within a Center

Use this process to configure programs for a specific center so that families can see and register for them online. Programs define what parents see, how age eligibility works, which groups and rates apply, and how enrollment, deposits, and rollovers are managed.

How to Set Up Programs within a Center

This document explains how to configure online registration tab settings for a specific center, including deposit terms and custom registration questions that appear to parents during online enrollment.

How to Set Up Custom Registration Questions & Online Deposit Terms

Use this process to configure, update, and maintain parent agreement documents (such as policies and handbooks) for each center. Parents will review and sign these non-fillable PDF agreements through the parent portal during online registration, and signed copies will be stored in the child’s digital file cabinet and remain accessible to both admin and parents.

How to Set Up Agreements & Policies for Parent Sign Off

This process walks you through configuring health-related custom information for your center in the setup module, including custom immunizations and health symptoms used in digital health and incident reports.

How to Configure the Health Section in Set Up

Use this process to configure prohibited meal types for your center so parents can indicate which menu meals their children should not receive, helping your kitchen staff plan appropriate meals and alternatives such as vegitarian options.

How to Configure Prohibited Meal Types in Center Setup

This article explains how to configure and manage staff positions in the Staff custom section within the Setup module for a specific center. These positions are later used in the Staff module when assigning roles to staff members.

How to Set Up Custom Staff Roles

This article explains how to authenticate your email domain and configure automated emails in ChildFriendly so that messages are sent directly from your center's professional email address and are less likely to be marked as spam.

You will learn how to:
- Authenticate Your Domain: Set up secure, professional email delivery to keep your messages out of parent spam folders.
- Automate the Enrollment Pipeline: Configure automated emails that trigger seamlessly at every stage of the family journey—starting from the initial Inquiry, moving to the Tour, all the way to fully Registered.
- Save Administrative Time: Keep parents consistently informed and engaged throughout the entire enrollment process without requiring manual follow-ups from your front office staff.

How to Authenticate your Domain & Configure Automated Emails

Use kiosk mode to allow parents to sign their children in at a reception-area tablet before proceeding to the child’s room. This configuration is optional and is generally used only by centers that specifically want a front-reception sign-in workflow instead of (or in addition to) staff signing-in children directly, as they arrive at their room.

How to Set Up Kiosk Mode for Parent Direct Sign In

This document explains the final configuration options for your center in ChildFriendly. Use these settings to control email behavior during setup, attendance handling, parent communications, reporting requirements, registration fields, and expiry reminders so they align with your center’s operational and regulatory needs.

The Set Up Module's Custom Configurations Section Guide

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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 overview walks org admins through the Setup module in ChildFriendly, showing how to configure organization-wide and center-specific settings so your team can start using the system efficiently.

How to Get Set Up- Overview

This article explains how to add and manage admin users and room staff users in Child Friendly, including assigning roles, configuring access to centers, handling required compliance information, and managing device authorization.

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 article explains how to perform a one-time bulk import of all your family, student, and staff data into ChildFriendly using CSV templates. You will download the appropriate templates, populate them with your data, and then upload them into the system, ensuring families and students are correctly linked via a shared family email.

How to Transfer Your Data to ChildFriendly

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

This document explains how to configure and manage the center layout in the ChildFriendly attendance module, including adding spaces, arranging them on the canvas, and finalizing your layout.

How to Setup the Attendance Center Layout

This document explains how to authenticate your custom email domain in the Setup module so that emails are sent from your own domain instead of the default ChildFriendly address.

How to Authenticate Your Domain for Emails

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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

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

This document explains how to add a new family, manage family member profiles and approve parent‑submitted information changes in ChildFriendly.

How to Manually Add Child and Family Members

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

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 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 guide outlines how to create a drop-in fee/rate for students and the procedure to follow when they require drop-in care.

How to Create and Administer Drop-In Programs

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

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

This process explains how a center admin can change which family member is set as the primary portal member in a family’s profile. The primary portal member is typically the parent or guardian who first registered the child and is responsible for receiving and managing key notifications.

How to Change the Primary Portal Member on a Family Account

ChildFriendly Pro allows you to tailor your registration process by adding specific questions that are in addition to the preset form. This feature ensures you collect the exact data needed for your center’s operations, from dietary needs to regional compliance requirements. By using a variety of formats like dropdowns and multiple choice, you can streamline the parent experience while maintaining organized, audit-ready records.

How to Add Custom Questions to Online Registration Form

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)

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

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

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

Guides on managing daily student tracking, check-ins, and classroom transitions. Learn how to navigate the Attendance Cards view, interpret icons using the Symbol Guide, mark students as absent, and adjust or edit past attendance records. Plus, get step-by-step instructions on moving children to school and troubleshooting the Forbidden Age Group error.

Attendance Module Help

This document explains how to use the ChildFriendly attendance module to view room activity, pin important rooms, manage staff and child attendance, move children between spaces, track nap times, and sign children in and out efficiently and compliantly.

How to Use the Attendance View (Signing In/Out)

This document explains the meaning of the different symbols displayed beside children’s names in the attendance module. These icons provide a quick way to identify medical conditions, allergies, meal plans, program enrollment, and absence details, and show you where to click to view more information in each child’s profile.

Attendance Module Symbol Guide

This process shows how to move children into a transport space (such as a van), sign them in with the appropriate staff and authorized drop-off details, and then sign them out again when they are dropped off at school.

How to Move Children to School

This document explains how admins can edit, delete, and adjust attendance records for both staff and children, including sign-in and sign-out times, and how these changes affect attendance reports.

How to Adjust and Edit Past Attendance Records

This process explains how staff can mark a student as absent either from the center or from school bus pickup using the RSVP section of the student’s profile. Absences can be one-time, extended (e.g., vacations), or recurring, and will notify the appropriate staff, including bus drivers.

How to Mark a Student as Absent

This document explains how to identify and resolve the “forbidden age group” warning in ChildFriendly. You will verify which children are in the space, review space permissions, adjust permitted age groups if needed, or move children to appropriate spaces, all while complying with your local regulations.

How to Resolve the Forbidden Age Group Error

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

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?

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

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

Your complete guide to curriculum management, lesson planning, and developmental tracking. Learn how to set up your core curriculum, create and edit weekly learning plans, manage admin approvals for lessons and assessments, complete child progress reports, generate weekly program shopping lists, and review the module from the parent's perspective.

Learning Module Help

This document explains how administrators can use the Learning Module admin dashboard to review and approve weekly learning plans, individual lessons, and child progress report assessments.

How to Approve Lessons, Weekly Plans and Assessments

This document explains how to view lesson details, understand lesson structure, and effectively use the Organization Lessons, and Marketplace Lessons tabs to find and copy lessons into your personal library. Continue to the Part 2 Guide to learn how to use the My Lessons tab where you can create and submit lessons to admin for certification.

How to Create and Edit Lessons- Part 1

This document explains how to find, create, edit, and submit lessons for certification using the My Lessons tab. You will learn how to use filters (including certification status), update existing lessons, create new lessons from scratch, add learning outcomes, images, and materials, and request administrative approval.

How to Create and Edit Lessons- Part 2

This document explains how to navigate the Plans tab in the Learning Module, filter and manage weekly learning plans, and create or edit plans with routines, activities, images, materials, and associated lessons. It also covers how plans are submitted for approval and shared with families.

How to Create Weekly Learning Plans

This document explains how teachers, administrators, and parents can access, complete, review, certify, and view student progress reports within the learning module. It covers both group and individual (student-level) progress report views, including how assessments are added, approved, rejected, and displayed to parents.

How to Complete Child Progress Reports

Use this process to automatically generate shopping lists for all supplies needed to run your staff’s weekly program plans, based on approved plans and enrolled children.

How to Generate Weekly Program Shopping Lists

This document explains how to access, review, customize, and add curriculums within the Setup section of the Learning Module’s Curriculum tab. Use these steps to manage domains, focus areas, and outcomes so they align with your organization’s educational framework.

How to Set Up Your Curriculum

This guide outlines the process for configuring routines, discovery topics, growth indicators, and approval workflows in the Learning Module under Setup. Following these steps will help streamline how your center organizes, reviews, and delivers weekly plans, lessons, and progress reports.

How to Customize Other Learning Module Settings

This document describes what parents see in the Parent Portal for Weekly Learning Plans, Focus Area reports, and Progress Reports. It outlines how parents access each section, view details, and interpret the information that highlights the center’s curriculum and efforts.

Viewing the Learning Module from the Parents Perspective

Your complete administrative toolkit for childcare billing, invoicing, and revenue tracking. Learn how to navigate the Family Finance tab, set up ledgers for auto-billing, and issue invoices. Get step-by-step guides on processing payments, credits, refunds across multiple invoices, managing prorated or one-time charges, and configuring automated fees or discounts. Plus, learn how to handle returned payments, reconcile third-party or subsidy payments, run financial reports, and generate parent tax receipts, invoices, and statements.

Financial Processing & Ledgers

Use the Family Finance tab to view and manage a specific family’s monthly billing details, filter transactions by date, preview and send statements, invoices, and receipts, and initiate one-off billings when needed.

How to Navigate the Family Finance Tab

This document explains how to record manual payments, process PAD payments (individually and in bulk), manage credits and credit memos, issue refunds, and access receipts and statements in the ChildFriendly Pro Finance module.

How to Process Payments, Credits & Refunds

This document explains how to record payments and refunds from families using the Payments, Refunds, and Credits function in the Finance module. It covers applying a payment across multiple invoices or credit memos, handling underpayments via automatic reconciliation, and processing refunds.

How to Apply a Payment or Refund to Multiple Open Invoices & Memos

This document explains how to access a family’s ledger in ChildFriendly, review balances and sponsors, and configure automatic tuition billing, adjustments, supplemental fees, set up third party billings and subsidies, discounts, and tax receipts.

How to Set Up a Families Ledger for Auto Billing

This document outlines how to use the Finance module in ChildFriendly to view, generate, edit, and manage billings and invoices for families at your center, including recurring tuition, custom one-time charges, sponsor allocations, and payments.

How to Create and Process Billings & Invoices

This process explains how to adjust billings and Invoices. You will learn how to prorate a billing when a child starts mid-month and how to add one-time charges either to a billing or directly to an invoice so families receive accurate, consolidated invoices.

How to Adjust Billing for Prorated and One-Time Charges

This guide explains three distinct methods for issuing refunds to parents or sponsors in ChildFriendly when there are credits or overpayments on their account. Each method details a different way to process refunds, whether for individual credit memos, via payments and refunds, or for all credits on a sponsor’s ledger.

How to Refund a Parent

This process explains how to record a single lump-sum payment from a third party (such as a sponsor or grant provider) that covers multiple children’s invoices, and how to ensure only the relevant third-party invoices are included.

Part 1: Record & Reconcile Third Party Payments

This document explains how to reconcile third-party payments after they have been recorded, ensuring that the amounts in your system match the third-party statement and your bank deposit. You will learn how to locate the recorded payments, compare and adjust them against the statement, create any necessary balance invoices, and verify the final deposit in the Deposited screen.

Part 2: Record & Reconcile Third Party Payments

This document explains how to group manually recorded payments (cash and checks) into deposit groups that match the single combined deposit amounts appearing on your bank statement. It also covers how to correct amounts before depositing, how to revert a deposit group, and how to clear e‑transfers that appear individually on your bank statement.

How to Group Payments Into Lump Sum Deposits

This document explains how to locate deposited transactions, mark a payment as failed (NSF or returned), and track the resulting recovery invoices so you can collect the funds again and apply any penalties.

How to Process Returned Payments

Use the Finance module’s filters to narrow down registrations, invoices, credits, and payments so you can quickly find exactly the billing and payment information you need.