Challenge

For childcare businesses, planning, scheduling, staffing, and communicating with all of the parties involved takes considerable focus and resources that could be better spent providing children with excellent care and enriching learning experiences. Similarly, for parents, the tasks of booking childcare, paying their childcare providers, and staying in contact with providers day to day are time consuming and logistics heavy.

The Child Care Seer founders sought to develop childcare management software to streamline business operations for childcare professionals, so they could spend more time delivering exceptional service while managing labor more efficiently. In addition to solving the headache of coordinating calendars and teacher availability, Child Care Seer also wanted the platform to handle billing, collecting payments, and processing payouts.

Child Care Seer needed a reliable, flexible payments system that could support multiple payment methods, including credit cards, ACH, and bank transfers. The company also needed to offer a seamless customer experience that helped childcare providers and families easily manage scheduling, staffing, and communication with greater efficiency and ease.

Solution

Child Care Seer worked with Toptal, a Stripe Partner, to bring its vision to life. Building off the initial idea, Toptal helped define the creative and technical direction for Child Care Seer and recommended a technical stack and resource proposal. From there, Toptal moved on to other phases in collaboration with Child Care Seer, including design and prototyping, development and testing, and quality assurance and delivery.

For Child Care Seer's monetary infrastructure, Toptal identified Stripe as capable of handling all the platform's complex needs—and future needs as it scales and grows. Child Care Seer integrated Stripe Payments and other Stripe products, including Billing, Invoicing, Connect, and Elements, to build a comprehensive, scalable payments system that was capable of integrating monthly and yearly subscriptions and suitable for many different use cases, including:
- Day-care center owners, who use it to manage their business and the underlying finances
- Managers, who use it for all scheduling, logistics, and payroll
- Parents, who use it to pay for and manage their child’s day-care attendance
- Teachers, whose hours are scheduled and tracked in the platform
With Toptal’s expertise and on-demand talent, and Stripe’s suite of products, Child Care Seer built and launched a seamless platform to solve some of the biggest business challenges that childcare professionals encounter—a vision that became a reality.

Results

Toptal and Stripe’s partnership helped Child Care Seer bring its product to market in less than 12 months. In the process, Stripe and Toptal saved significant time for Child Care Seer’s finance, risk, operations, and engineering teams.

Today, childcare centers, teaching staff, and families use the platform to streamline day-care management and eliminate the time-consuming logistics common with running a childcare business. To date, 73% of bill payers using Child Care Seer have set up their credit card within the platform. And the platform has more than 1,200 parents enrolled in online payments, making it faster and easier for parents to pay their bills and for child care centers to collect payments and pay their staff. In a single month this year, the company saw a 18% increase in the number of parents opting to pay online, which helps businesses get paid faster and track payments more easily.

Since its launch, Child Care Seer has attracted new customers and expanded into a new segment of the market: infant day-care centers. The company has also introduced a companion app. The app allows parents to receive real-time updates on their child’s activities throughout the day, plus pay bills, sign up for additional hours of care, and view the upcoming food menu.

About Toptal

Toptal is an exclusive network of the top freelance software developers, designers, finance experts, product managers, and project managers in the world. Top companies hire Toptal freelancers for their most important projects.