Predicting Enrollment

Wouldn’t it be helpful to know how many enrolled children you can anticipate in the future—say for this fall or next spring or some other point in time? Well, there are a couple of ways you can use Procare to predict future enrollment.

Using Enrollment Dates

The most basic method is to keep child enrollment dates current, making sure to change their status to Withdrawn or Summer Break, etc. when they are away and setting it to enrolled again if they are expected to return later. To change the status for many children at once, use the Batch Change Enrollment Status feature.

Then, run a birthday / age report to sort the children by their age at some point in the future, say this fall.

1.  Go to Reports > Standard Reports > Family Data > Filtered Reports > Child: Birthday – Age     Summary.
2. Sort the report by Youngest to Oldest (or Oldest to Youngest), whichever you prefer.
3. Be sure to filter the report to only include children whose Enrollment Status is marked as “enrolled” as of your future date.

The children will be shown in their current Primary Classroom, which may be different than the room they would be assigned to in the future—so go by their future age, rather than the classroom. (Hint: you can schedule them in a future room, see below under “Using Schedules”.)

You may even export the report to Excel, if you prefer to work with the data in a spreadsheet. For best results, choose one of the Excel “Data-Only” formats.

Using Schedules

The preferred method for predicting enrollment is to schedule children into their current and future classrooms. By defining the dates for which each schedule is active, you’ll be able to run reports for past, present and future program sessions. This has the advantage of showing you accurate counts for each room.

1.  Set each Child’s Schedule to what you anticipate it will be in the future.
2. Go to Reports > Standard Reports > Family Data > Classroom Schedule. Although there are many useful reports here, we recommend the Classroom Schedule Enrollment Counts which gives you day-by-day totals with the number of available slots for the month you choose. Note: A negative number means you have too many children scheduled.