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The real cost of documentation in childcare

An average childcare center can save $1,877 a year on printing and free up 980 HOURS worth of educator time if they use HiMama! That’s over $30,000 in savings per year!

If you sit down and think about the real costs of documentation in early childhood, you may be surprised how many resources are utilized to meet guidelines and current standard practices. Let’s take a closer look at what your childcare center is spending on documentation and figure out how much time and money HiMama can save!

Printing

For a childcare center with 60 children to provide daily reports on printed templates, as well as weekly schedules and attendance sheets, printing can cost up to $1,877!
Over 85% of this cost comes from ink, as it can cost anywhere between 3 to 12 cents a page depending on your printer’s brand and how many colors you use
There is an environmental cost to printing as well. In one year, the average center may use up to 22,000 sheets of paper. If you were to stack 22,000 sheets of paper lengthwise, the stack would be as tall as the tallest mountain in North America (Denali)!

Educator time

On average, educators spend 45 minutes a day on documentation, but this can vary. Some educators spend over 90 minutes a day on documentation!
For a 60-child center, the effort spent on documentation costs approximately $30,000 a year
As educators also have to juggle spending time with the children, lesson planning and set-up and clean-up of all activities, time saved on documentation can also free up more time to spend with the children and ensure high-quality programming.

HiMama to the rescue

HiMama reduces paper usage by 100%

Anything you do on paper can be completed, saved, and shared with parents through the HiMama app, including daily reports, attendance, lesson plans, menus, and more.

HiMama reduces time spent on documentation by almost 3 hours a day for the average center

With HiMama, educators can input sleep, meal, and activity updates for all or some of your children all at once – no more writing the same note 15 times!
Daily reports are distributed to the families electronically at the end of the day so no chasing families around at pick-up.
Learning and development observations can be logged easily on-the-fly and are stored as part of each child’s development assessment portfolio.

Here is an example of how easy it is to add an activity to all children in a classroom and send a photo to all of their families in the HiMama app: