January 2020 Product Update: What’s New

The HiMama team has been hard at work building bigger and better features. We’ve been especially focused on improving HiMama’s billing functionality, so if you don’t currently have access to this module and are interested in learning more please shoot an email to support@himama.com. Find a summary of all the new features available below.

New: Add Past Attendance Records 

Ever catch a gap in your attendance records and wished you could fix it? It’s now possible to add attendance records that took place in the past! You’re able to add attendance records of both children and staff members.

To access this feature, select the child, or staff, profile and visit their respective attendance summary page. Then click on the particular day you wish to add an entry for. 

New: Center-wide Active Enrollment Report

You can now run a list of all the children currently enrolled at your center. The list includes the child’s name, date of birth (DOB), classroom, enrollment date, and graduation date. If you’d like to sort the list just click on the desired column name and it will sort your list in either descending or ascending order. 

To view this report, head to the Reports page, select ‘Printable Lists,’ and then ‘Active Enrollment.’

New: Expiring Staff Certification Alerts 

Note: This feature is only available to centers using HiMama’s Staff Management feature

Do you keep a record of your staff members’ certifications? Whether it be a CPR certificate or RECE record, HiMama helps you store electronic records of important documents. In many cases, these certificates or records have an expiration date, at which point they’ll need to be renewed. To ensure you’re being compliant, HiMama will now automatically alert you when a staff member’s CPR certificate is going to expire. The notice will be triggered 60 days in advance of the expiration date. You will see an alert on your center’s Dashboard, and the Staff List page.

New: Send Invoices Before They’re Due

When creating a new tuition plan or one-time invoice you now have the ability to preview and send invoices in advance of a due date. For example, if you wish to be paid before an invoice is due then the invoice can now be automatically sent several days in advance of the due date. This change also allows you to preview invoices that are ready to go before they actually get sent out. 

This added level of control helps you get paid on your preferred schedule and improves your cash flow. Learn more 

Note: This change does not impact existing tuition plans, this will only impact newly created tuition plans. If you wish to modify existing plans, then please contact support@himama.com for assistance. 

Improvement: View All Messages Per Child 

Administrators now easily view an archive of all the messages exchanged between your center and a child’s parents/guardians. This is essentially a way to filter your messages by each individual child. To see this summary, visit a child’s profile, and click on the ‘View Messages’ link. You will now see a comprehensive archive of all messages pertaining to that particular child.

Improvement: Revenue Summary Report is Now Cashflow Summary Report

Note: this report is only available to those using HiMama Billing’s feature.

The Revenue Summary report has been renamed the “Cashflow Summary” report to better reflect industry-recognized naming. The report has also been improved, it now shows collected payments broken down by the payee’s payment method, such as credit card, bank transfer, cash, and check. This is a quick way to see how much revenue you’ve collected.

Improvement: Exportable Billing Reports 

You can now export HiMama billing reports as a CSV or XLS file, which is readable in Microsoft Excel, Apple computers, and others. Exporting reports from HiMama allows you to edit and customize your data as needed. Tip: you can now more easily import billing data into your accounting software. 

Improvement: Hide Child’s Last Name from Parent Sign-in

A new Center-wide setting has been added to HiMama. Administrators can now decide whether they want parents to see the full names of all children when signing-in their kid. You now have the option to display a child’s first name, and last name initial, rather than just the full name alone. To activate this setting, visit the Settings page and then scroll down the ‘Center Settings’ section. Voila!

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for further updates in the weeks to come.

Maddie Hutchison

Maddie is a Registered Early Childhood Educator with a Master's in Early Childhood Studies. Her specialty is in Children's Rights and she is currently a Content Strategist for HiMama!

5 comments

  • Nadine Froli says:

    Thank you.
    I would like to suggest that you also consider the following:
    1)The option to add more than 1 attachment to a message
    2)The option to be able to send a message to more than one classroom (selecting a few individual classrooms), as opposed to sending a message to only Child, Classroom, Age Group or Center

  • Nadine Froli says:

    Thank you, so much. The other request we have is to be able to attach Power Point Presentations. During lockdown, we are sending the parents material and often these are created by our Head office in a Power Point format, we we are unable to send on HiMama

    • Hello Nadine,

      If you save the PowerPoint file as a PDF file format you can then attach it to messages in HiMama. The PDF file format is actually better for most families because they can read it on their phones, whereas you cannot do that with PowerPoint!

  • Nadine Froli says:

    Thank you, we have been doing that. However, some of the PowerPoint Presentations have audio, so converting to PDF loses this audio and the other thing is that Head Office sometimes send files that are not editable or convertible. That becomes challenging.

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