The operating reality for childcare and early learning
A childcare group runs on people and paperwork. Each centre takes enrolments, tracks attendance, bills families, rosters educators, and holds family agreements and consent forms. Across a group of centres, the same work repeats site by site, and head office spends its days reconciling the picture. Enrolment data lives in one tool, rosters in another, signed agreements in a filing cabinet or an inbox, and finance somewhere else again.
The gaps between those systems are where the cost sits. A family enrolled at one centre is set up again at another. An educator who moves between sites is rostered in two places. A signed agreement is hard to find when it is needed. Building a view across centres means pulling exports together by hand, and the result is always a little out of date.
The Cohiva products that fit
Cohiva is an integrated operating platform of purpose-built products that share one identity and one data layer. For a childcare and early learning operator, four products do the work.
- Complex manages enrolments, bookings, point of sale and access control across your centres. See it at complex.cohiva.app.
- Culture rosters educators and manages leave, timesheets and a payroll export for shift-based teams. See educator rostering and payroll for childcare.
- Sign captures enrolment agreements and family forms as e-signatures with a full audit trail. See family agreements for childcare.
- Crunch consolidates finance across centre entities with multi-entity consolidation. See it at crunch.cohiva.app.
How the shared data layer changes the work
Because the products share one identity and one data layer, a childcare group operates on one platform rather than a stack of disconnected tools.
A family enrolled in Complex is recognised across the products rather than re-keyed for each new form or centre. The enrolment agreement they sign goes out through Sign and comes back with a full audit trail, tied to that family. The educators who care for their child are rostered in Culture, with timesheets that feed the payroll export. The fees, point of sale and activity captured in Complex flow into the consolidated finance view in Crunch. One source, not five.
A normal week across the group
Consider a week at a three-centre operator. A new family enrols at the first centre through Complex, so the child's place, attendance and billing are set from one record. Their enrolment agreement and consent forms go out through Sign and return signed, held against the family with an audit trail rather than scattered across an inbox. When that family later books care at a second centre, they are already recognised on the data layer, so there is no fresh set-up.
Through the week, educators are rostered in Culture across the three sites. Leave requests and timesheets are captured where the shifts happen, and the payroll export is built from the hours actually worked rather than reassembled at the end of the fortnight. Meanwhile, the fees and casual charges taken in Complex are recorded as they occur, so by Friday the finance view in Crunch reflects the week across all three centres without a manual export.
Why integration matters across centres
A childcare group lives on the question of how the centres are doing together. Occupancy, fee income, educator cost and agreement coverage are all harder to answer when each centre runs its own tools, because every answer starts with collecting data from sites. When enrolment, rostering, agreements and finance sit on one data layer, the group view comes from one place: Complex holds the front-of-house operation, Sign holds the agreement record, Culture holds the workforce, and Crunch consolidates finance across the centre entities.
That shared layer also keeps growth manageable. Opening a fourth centre does not mean standing up a fourth set of disconnected systems. The new site joins the same identity and the same data layer, so families, educators, agreements and finance stay connected rather than fragmenting per centre.
Built for multi-site operators
Cohiva suits childcare and early learning operators running several centres who want enrolments, workforce, agreements and finance connected. As the group grows, those pieces stay on one data layer rather than splintering into per-site tools.
If you run childcare centres, start with the Complex overview for enrolments and operations, then see how educator rostering and family agreements fit the way your group works. Multi-brand operators can also see the franchises solution.