Afterschool programs and other community-based programs have specialized administrative needs that can require more resources than are available to manage and maintain. Afterschool management software can save precious resources while generating required reports and using real-time data to make program decisions.
What Is a Community-Based Program?
A community-based program is supported and driven by community residents. Local residents are a majority of the governing body and staff, and the main operating offices reside within the community. The community residents define the priorities and have a significant say in developing customized solutions.
Community residents are highly involved in program design, implementation, and evaluation, as well as leadership positions.
Many afterschool programs fall under the definition of a community-based program. The local community knows the needs of its children and adolescents the best and is in a place to do something about it.
The community defines the program components and often keeps track of attendance, payment, grants, and agency subsidization matching. It is also responsible for generating compliance reports.
The Benefits of Childcare Management and Reporting Software
Software automates many of the administrative tasks required of an afterschool program. Users can track all forms of data and generate multiple types of reports, including those required by the Federal 21st Century Community Learning Center program.
Afterschool programs in low-income areas often rely on state and local grants, subsidized payments, and the need to accept multiple payment methods. Each of these comes with complex requirements for tracking data and producing reports, and attempting to track this data manually takes resources that are needed elsewhere.
Since many community-based programs rely on volunteers and employees that may work more than one job, software that can save time while providing accurate results can mean the difference between the success or failure of the program.
Software specializing in childcare and afterschool management takes over data entry, reporting, billing, payment processing, and other administrative tasks that can be repetitive and filled with errors yet are needed for compliance and program progress and success.
Everything Runs on Reports
Afterschool programs relying on grants must often provide special reports to the grant-funding institutions, many of which must be customized to the institution. Childcare and educational programming should see how and whether each student is progressing in school so it can provide the appropriate activities and resources for student success.
Creating and sending invoices to bill parents and agencies is another task that takes up administrative time and effort, as does accepting and processing payments. Attendance reports, rosters, and staff scheduling all have their own reporting requirements.
Manual reporting takes time - time to gather all the data in one place, time to input that data, and time to develop and print the report.
Automate Your Afterschool Program Reporting
EZReports provides over 40 standard reports with multiple ways to represent the data.
With management software, you can generate multiple student and staff demographics reports, capture and store barcode badge data from students and adults affiliated with the program, and access an array of enrollment lists and count reports.
EZReports offers multiple roster formats and attendance reports, many of which include graphical tools to aid in data presentation. It can handle various student grade and test score reports, including comparison reports for pre- and post-testing.
Create a custom teacher survey so teachers can respond via smartphone or tablet, then collate the data, send reminders for teachers to complete the survey, and perform other activities to inform your program decisions.
The Federal 21st Century Community Learning Program requires specific reports such as the grantee profile report (21GPR) and annual progress report (21APR). Most states also require specialized forms and reporting - EZReports has the resources to provide custom reports for multiple states.
Reporting includes a report wizard for ad-hoc report generation and the ability to automate the time to generate a report.
EZReport meets all users' reporting needs and includes detailed reports from the student level to the aggregated site, grantee, and state level. You can also export the data to Excel or into a PDF format.
Download Day School Grades and Test Scores
Of vital importance to a community-based organization is whether the assistance provided by the afterschool program matches the needs of the local schools. EZReports helps by allowing program managers and other users to see each student's grades and test scores. The users can then analyze the grades and scores to determine where to best use resources and which specific activities might help improve or support the student.
Downloading and analyzing grades and test scores not only meet compliance requirements but also allows you to determine the types of support required for your specific community. Do you need a teacher who specializes in math or science? Or do your students need help reading?
Perhaps you need arts and music programming to supplement what might not be available in the local schools due to budget concerns. You can use the reports to identify the needs of individual students and the classes as a whole.
Take Advantage of Web-Based Afterschool Management Software
Web-based afterschool management software doesn't require additional hardware or an IT department. The software is maintained and updated by the vendor so that you are assured of compliance with changes in requirements and security.
It also allows you to access the solution from anywhere, using any device, at any time. You won't be locked out of an office where the only computer sits. Program directors can allow access to varying levels of administrators and users to maintain information security and data accuracy.
Any community-based organization can benefit from the afterschool management software's data access, storage, and reporting capabilities. EZReports offers all these features and benefits and can respond to your specific needs.
EZReports provides automated reporting, both standardized and custom. You can access information from other systems or integrate with EZChildtrack to provide even more valuable benefits.
Contact EZReports to learn how we can help your community-based organization's afterschool programming or childcare centers succeed in supporting your kids.