Tiny Adventures
RSM2000 - making change easy for a Macclesfield nursery
The client
Tiny Adventures is a 53 place nursery located in the Macclesfield Learning Zone. It provides full day care for children from twelve weeks to six years old.The Problem
In July 2007 Sophie Peach and Monika Pollard took over an existing nursery business. With fees payable monthly in advance and parents paying by a variety of methods, ensuring timely receipt of monies owed had become an expensive and time consuming drain on resources.Every month parents were invoiced and staff would commence the task of ensuring that all outstanding fees were paid. Be this by cheque, cash or sometimes by parents setting up standing orders. Keeping on top of so many individual transactions and chasing late payments was a logistical nightmare. In addition with payments coming in on so many different days of the month numerous trips to the bank were needed.
Another problem was that parents often paid by different methods from one month to the next, making payment tracking and chasing missed payments even more complex and time consuming. Inevitably fees were always late in which was having a negative impact on both cashflow and customer service.
The Solution
Talking to other people within the nursery sector Sophie and Monika discovered that their problem was common within the industry. However many businesses had found that Direct Debit provided a solution - removing the need to rely on parents to pay on time and passing control to the business. Following extensive research into potential service providers, Sophie and Monica felt that RSM2000 offered both the services they needed and the expertise to help them through the set up process - a vital consideration as they had no previous experience of setting up Direct Debit collections.RSM2000 provided detailed instructions explaining what they needed to do and how things worked. Once the system was set up RSM2000’s support continued with advice and documentation on how the system worked and how they should operate.
Sophie explained, “RSM2000 were extremely helpful and we discovered that, with their help operating a direct debit collection system was actually quite easy. It has taken a lot of the pain out of collecting fees. Each month we submit a single file on-line and once the collections are complete we download a report to check the status of each payment. “Collecting our fees by Direct Debit means we are always paid on time. No more chasing 70 or 80 parents, if a Direct Debit fails we know immediately and can talk to the parent to quickly resolve the matter.
“Our cash flow is very healthy now and the time taken to chase and collect fees has been more than halved.”
