When a kids' club outgrows its booking system
Most club booking software is built around one idea: a child attends a class, weekly, for a term. Holiday clubs sold by the day, wraparound care split across breakfast and after school, sibling pricing and funded places all sit outside that idea, so providers end up running the exceptions on a spreadsheet beside the system. The moment to act is when the spreadsheet becomes the real register, not when the software finally refuses.
The signs, in the order they arrive
Nothing announces itself. Providers describe the same sequence, roughly in this order, over two or three years of growth.
- Somebody starts keeping a spreadsheet alongside the system, for one thing the system will not do.
- The spreadsheet becomes the version staff actually trust on the day.
- Holiday club bookings are taken by email or message because the platform cannot sell a Tuesday and a Thursday but not a Wednesday.
- Refunds and credits are worked out by hand, and two people give different answers to the same parent.
- Nobody can say how many places are left across a week without opening four screens.
- Someone is doing a full day of admin a week that did not exist last year.
That last one is the number that matters. A day a week at a modest wage is somewhere near £6,000 a year of staff time, spent working around software you are also paying for. Measure it before you decide anything, because it is the figure that makes the case either way.
Software built for one class a week
The dominant platforms in this market grew up serving swim schools, dance schools and football coaching, and they are good at that job. A child is enrolled in a class, the class runs weekly, a term is billed in advance, and the register is the same list every Tuesday.
Multi-activity providers break every one of those assumptions. A child does gymnastics on Monday and drama on Thursday, taught by different staff in different rooms, sometimes at different sites. The system was built to think of that child as two unrelated enrolments, so it invoices twice, counts them twice in your headcount, and cannot tell you that the family is one family.
Sibling pricing is where this shows up first, because a discount that depends on the household rather than the enrolment has no natural home in a system that does not really model households. Most providers end up applying it manually, which is fine at thirty families and impossible at three hundred.
Holiday clubs and camps break the model completely
A term of swimming is one product sold once. A week of holiday club is up to five products sold in any combination, to a child who may come for two days, arrive at eight and leave at three, and bring a packed lunch on one of them.
What that needs, and what termly software rarely has:
- Daily selection with per-day capacity. Monday full, Wednesday half empty, priced per day with a discount for the full week.
- Extended hours as add-ons, early drop-off and late collection sold separately against their own limits.
- Age bands with separate capacities in the same room on the same day, because ratios differ by age and your staffing follows the bands rather than the total.
- A register that reads as a day, not a term. Who is here today, who is expected, who has an allergy, who is collected by whom.
- Late bookings. A parent booking at nine the night before is normal in holiday provision and is the single most common thing a termly system cannot take money for cleanly.
Providers running HAF places in England, funded for children eligible for free school meals, carry a second problem alongside all this: the same session sold three ways, funded, paid and partly both, with reporting the funder expects and the software has never heard of.
Wraparound, and what this September changed
Under the National Wraparound Childcare Programme, every working parent of a primary school child in England should be able to access childcare from 8am to 6pm in their area from September 2026. Funded breakfast club provision expanded to a further 2,000 primary schools from April 2026, with start-up funding attached.
For providers this has meant scaling up quickly, and wraparound has a shape of its own. It is two short sessions a day at either end, often in a school rather than your own premises, with children who attend some days and not others, patterns that change with a parent's shift rota, and collection arrangements that have to be right every single time.
The operational load is not the booking. It is the register at 3:15pm: who is coming today, who is not, who has changed since this morning, and who is authorised to collect each child. A system that cannot produce that on a phone, offline, in a playground, is not serving the part of the job that carries the risk.
Funded places do awkward things to your billing
Providers working with younger children carry a funding layer that most club software was never designed for. Children from nine months qualify for 15 funded hours a week over 38 term-time weeks, rising to 30 hours for working parents of children up to four. Those hours are a term-time entitlement being consumed by a provider who may operate all year, which means stretching, and stretching means arithmetic.
Tax-Free Childcare adds another. Parents pay into a government account which tops up £2 for every £8, capped at £2,000 per child a year, and it can be used for wraparound, breakfast clubs, after-school clubs and holiday clubs. The money arrives from the scheme rather than from the parent, on its own timing, and has to be reconciled against an invoice raised somewhere else.
A single child can therefore be part funded hours, part Tax-Free Childcare, part card payment, with a sibling discount applied across the household. Systems that assume one payer, one method and one invoice cannot represent that, so it gets represented in a spreadsheet by whoever understands it, and that person eventually goes on holiday.
Switch platform, or build
Most providers reading this should switch rather than build, and it is worth being direct about that. The market has moved: several platforms now handle daily holiday club selection and wraparound patterns properly, and a migration between terms is a few weeks of work rather than a project.
Before you look at features, look at what you are paying. Transaction fees in this market run from around 0.59% to 3% on top of card processing, and on £300,000 of annual bookings that spread is roughly £7,500 a year. We have set out the arithmetic separately. It is common for a provider to be paying more in fees than a better-fitting platform would cost in total.
Building is the right answer in a narrower set of cases: when your provision genuinely does not resemble anyone else's, when you are running enough payment volume that the fees alone justify it, or when the system is how you actually compete rather than how you administer. Multi-site operators with their own franchising or their own funded-place reporting are the usual candidates. If you are a single-site club with 200 children, you are not.
What to have ready before you talk to anyone
Whether you are moving platform or pricing a build, the same six things make the conversation short and the quote accurate.
- Your annual processed payment volume and the number of transactions.
- Your current transaction rate in writing, separated from card processing.
- A list of every session type you sell and how each is priced.
- The exceptions currently handled outside the system, honestly listed.
- How many hours a week those exceptions take, and whose hours they are.
- What has to be true on day one of next term, because that is your real deadline and it will decide the plan more than anything else.
If you want a view on whether switching or building makes more sense for your numbers, send those six things to hello@flitzen.co.uk. Frequently the answer is a different platform, and we will say so.
Common questions
The usual sign is a spreadsheet running alongside the system that staff have come to trust more than the system itself, together with bookings taken by email because the software cannot sell them. Measure the admin hours those workarounds consume each week. A day a week is roughly £6,000 a year of staff time spent working around software you are also paying for.
Because most of it was built for a weekly class billed by the term, and a holiday club is up to five separate days sold in any combination, with per-day capacity, age-banded ratios, extended hours as add-ons and a high proportion of last-minute bookings. Termly software can usually represent a week but not the individual days within it.
A register that works on a phone in a playground, showing who is expected today, what has changed since this morning and who is authorised to collect each child. Wraparound is two short sessions at either end of the day, often on school premises, with attendance patterns that change with parents' shifts. The risk sits in collection rather than in booking.
Some can and much of it cannot. A single child may be part funded hours, part Tax-Free Childcare top-up, part card payment, with a household sibling discount across the lot. Systems that assume one payer and one invoice per child cannot represent it, which is why so many providers reconcile funding by hand.
Usually not. Switching to a platform that fits is faster and cheaper for most single-site providers, and the market has improved. Building makes sense for multi-site operators, providers whose provision genuinely differs from the market, and anyone whose transaction fees alone have grown past the cost of owning a system, which tends to happen above roughly £500,000 of annual payment volume.
Where to go next
Want a straight answer about your own setup?
Tell us what you are running now and what is going wrong with it. We will say what we would do, including when the answer is that you do not need us.