magicbooking - Hear from Baron

magicbooking's Business Development Manager, Baron, shares his experience as an Extended Schools Manager

My name is Baron, I’m the Business Development Manager at magicbooking. My work focuses on introducing our all-encompassing, online solution to schools, MATs and out of school clubs across the UK.

I joined the magicbooking customer care team in January 2018, having already used the system as a customer for 2 years before joining the team.

Prior to joining the magicbooking, I worked for a Multi Academy Trust (MAT) in London, as the Extended Schools Manager, where we used magicbooking for our wraparound care, extra-curricular clubs, trips, school dinners and parents' evenings. Using an online solution allowed my team and I to ensure the smooth running of the extended provisions across our six sites in the trust.

Prior to using magicbooking, we used outdated systems such as paper forms for registration and bookings, endless calls and texts for cancellations and amendments as well as an online cashless solution that offered nothing more than a payment facility. As a result, our debts piled up because the billing was done in arrears. The parents were frustrated with our methods of contact, and not being able to have the flexibility of amending their bookings to suit their busy schedules, only added to their frustration.  The admin workload was intense because we spent far too much time chasing payments, manually generating registers, and processing cancellations. Not having an automated system meant that many hours went into the creation of spreadsheets that were used for our financial reporting and having to manually adjust our billings only increased the risk of human error. As you can tell, running our wraparound care in this way was not sustainable.

We ran our extra-curricular clubs termly and experienced the same difficulties we faced with our wraparound care prior to implementing an online solution. All bookings were made on a first come first served basis and we needed to have all the information ready to export and hand over to our outside providers. Collating the children’s booking & registration forms, medication and manually generating registers for the providers, took up to 4-6 hours per school before we implemented magicbooking to do it all for us.

Once we fully automated the wraparound and extra-curricular clubs, we saw a benefit in having all of our services automated using one single platform. Luckily magicbooking was able to help us automate our school dinner service which meant parents could pay in advance. Prior to this, we allowed all parents to top up their cashless accounts with credit to be used for school meals. This system had no facility to stop debts from being added to a parent account, meaning when the credit ran out, it would soon turn to arrears. The process for school meals was very costly for our trust and resulted in our admin teams spending insane amounts of time chasing school dinner money that was rarely recovered.

"As the Extended Schools Manager, my team and I were able to reduce our admin by 85%, simplify the account reconciliation process for the finance department and offer the parents a simple, sleek system to manage their own bookings – everybody was a winner!!

One of the biggest concerns for the trust was the lack of cohesion between the systems we used to manage our school dinners. We had a till provided by one supplier, a different supplier for our cashless software and therefore communicating with both suppliers to fix an issue only added more time to our admin. To make matters worse, these systems had no way of reflecting a child’s absence on the cashless software, so we didn’t know the actual number of children who had taken their meals daily which was a major concern for the trust.

Magicbooking addressed these pain points, as the school dinner module came with its own integrated till view. All we had to do was find a much more compact and appropriate device to replace the pre-historic, chunky till which once sat on a trolley in the dining hall!  We were able to mark the absent children, send SMS prompts to parents who had not booked and quickly obtain booked vs served reports for our catering providers – all whilst ensuring not a penny of debt for school meals.

It was only matter of time before we took on magicbooking's parent’s evening and school trips modules. We had spent so much time collating all information for children attending a school trip, by running reports from our MIS to share with the teachers for risk assessments. Magicbooking's online solution helped us to pull information from our MIS that was ready to use. My team simply downloaded the register for the relevant trip and included all allergy, dietary and contact information with one click!

Magicbooking really was our one-stop solution and thanks to this booking, payment and communication system, as the Extended Schools Manager my team and I were able to reduce our admin by 85%, simplify the account reconciliation process for the finance department and offer the parents a simple, sleek system to manage their own bookings – everybody was a winner!

If you want to see how magicbooking can improve your processes or have any questions about my experience as a previous Extended Schools Manager, I’d love to hear from you! Click here to arrange a strategy call with me whenever you are ready!

The information in this article is provided by magicbooking and does not represent Morton Michel.