Billing and check-in software for small childcare programs in New York City

Before you compare software, it helps to be clear about who regulates the kind of program you run, because that decides which records you are asked to keep and in what form. In New York City the line is drawn by setting type. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene publishes the permit page for group child care programs for children and adolescents. Home-based care, meaning family day care and group family day care in a provider's residence, is handled through New York State's Office of Children and Family Services, and the city health department publishes its own page describing that arrangement.

We link both official pages in the local resources section below. Read them directly rather than relying on a summary from a software company. Requirements change, and the agency text is the version that counts. DCare is a record-keeping tool; it cannot tell you whether a record satisfies an inspector, and we do not claim that it does.

What software can do is make the records you already decided to keep easier to produce. If your rules ask for daily arrival and departure times, a kiosk sign-in gives you time-stamped entries instead of a paper sheet that gets wet in the rain. If you need to show what a family was charged, an invoice history beats a folder of edited documents.

Picture a provider running a group family day care from a two-family house in Queens with an assistant and a mix of infants and preschoolers. Most families pay weekly, because that is how the provider has always done it and how several parents are paid themselves. Two families have siblings enrolled. One parent works overnight shifts at a hospital and is often picked up by a grandparent.

1. 1
   Set weekly rates per child. Each child gets a weekly rate in dollars. DCare drafts one invoice per family for the week starting Monday, with each child on a separate line
2. 2
   Add the sibling discount once. The percentage sits on the family record and applies to every child except the one with the highest rate, so nobody recalculates it by hand on Friday
3. 3
   Give the grandparent a pickup role. The family record lists the adults the parent has named. The kiosk records who signed the child out and when, which gives the provider a clear trail if a question comes up later
4. 4
   Record extras as one-off charges. A diaper restock or a late pickup becomes a dated line with a short description, visible to the parent in the portal before the next invoice run

The point of the example is not that this is how every Queens program should bill. It is that weekly billing with siblings and named pickup adults is a common shape for home-based care, and DCare handles that shape without a spreadsheet formula anyone has to defend.

Now imagine a small group child care program in the Bronx with around forty-five enrolled children across three rooms and a director who also does the books. Tuition is monthly and due on the first. A front-desk tablet sits by the entrance, and parents arrive in a narrow window between 7:45 and 8:30 before heading for the subway.

For a program this size, the morning matters more than the invoice. A queue at the door is the moment when a paper sign-in sheet fails: parents scribble a time, skip a column or forget to sign out at 6 p.m. A PIN or QR code at the kiosk takes a few seconds per family and writes an exact time to the child's attendance record, displayed in a 12-hour clock as US accounts expect.

On the billing side, the director sets a monthly billing day in Settings. On that day DCare drafts every family invoice, the director checks the list, and parents see their balance in the parent portal. If the program has Stripe configured and eligible, parents can pay online by card; if not, payments recorded by staff still keep balances accurate. DCare does not determine eligibility for subsidies or vouchers, and it does not file anything with the city.

Standard, at $99 per month, covers up to 60 enrolled children, which leaves this hypothetical center room to grow without changing tools.

Many New York City parents depend on subway or bus service to reach pickup on time, and every provider has a story about a parent stuck between stations at 6:10 p.m. Programs handle this differently. Some waive the first few minutes, some charge from the first minute, some have a grace policy written into the parent handbook. DCare does not pick a policy for you.

What it does is store your closing time and your late pickup fee in Settings, so the figure is the same no matter which staff member is closing. Because the kiosk time-stamps every sign-out, a disputed late fee becomes a conversation about a recorded time rather than about memory. If you decide to waive a fee because of a transit delay, you simply do not add the charge.

A practical tip from how small programs tend to work: write your late pickup rule in the same words in the handbook and in the charge description. When the parent sees "Late pickup after 6:00 p.m., 15 minutes" on the invoice line, there is less room for confusion.

It is common in the city for care to be shared across households: a parent in Brooklyn, another in Manhattan, and a grandparent in the Bronx doing two afternoons a week. Each family in DCare has one record with its children, guardians and contact details, and invoices go to that family. If two parents split tuition, record payments as they arrive against the same invoice; DCare does not automatically divide one invoice into two bills.

A note on language. The DCare interface is available in English and German. Many New York City families speak Spanish, Chinese, Bengali, Russian, Haitian Creole and many other languages at home, and the parent portal is not currently translated into those languages. If clear written communication in a family's first language is important to your program, keep that in mind and test the portal with a family before relying on it.

Small programs are asked for records by many people: an accountant at tax time, a parent who needs a year of payments for a dependent care account, a partner reviewing the books, and sometimes an inspector. DCare keeps invoices with sequential numbers, attendance with timestamps and family details in one account, and lets an owner export data as CSV or JSON.

For federal tax recordkeeping, the IRS publishes general guidance for small businesses, linked in the documentation note at the bottom of this page. For anything specific to New York State or New York City taxes, ask a qualified professional. We mention this because a software page that implies tax compliance is doing you a disservice.

A hypothetical family day care in Staten Island with eight children decides to try DCare during the 14-day trial, which needs no card. In the first evening the provider creates the account with the United States region, which fixes billing to USD and sets month-first dates. She adds eight children across six families, with weekly rates for five families and a monthly rate for one.

On day two she prints QR codes for the families who prefer scanning and gives PINs to the rest. By the end of the first week the kiosk has a full set of arrival and departure times. On the following Monday DCare drafts the weekly invoices; she reviews them, corrects one rate she had typed wrong, and parents see their balances in the portal.

Start, at $49 per month for up to 25 enrolled children, fits a program like this. If she decides DCare is not for her, the trial ends without a charge, because the trial never authorizes one. A paid subscription only starts after explicit confirmation in Stripe Checkout.

US accounts are billed in dollars at list prices, not converted from euro: Start is $49 per month for up to 25 enrolled children and Standard is $99 per month for up to 60, excluding applicable taxes. Both begin with a 14-day trial that needs no card. Your account region and currency are fixed when you sign up; reading this New York page does not change an existing account.

DCare is deliberately narrow. It covers families, tuition invoices, attendance and parent access for one setting. It does not do lesson plans, photo sharing, multi-site management or subsidy claims, and it does not interpret New York or local rules.