From Paper Notebooks and Sign-In Sheets to One Platform for Nursery HQs, Teachers and Parents
Since 2020, Bunbu has built and operated a childcare platform for a Japanese ICT service provider, bringing check-in, parent communication, photo sales, health records and education plans into one system.
A single day at a nursery produces a lot of paperwork
At a Japanese nursery, every child's day has to be recorded: arrival and pickup times, temperature, nap, meals, health, and a note for the parents. When most of that is done on paper, teachers spend more time on records than on children.
Teachers doubling as clerks
Parent–teacher notebooks, attendance sheets, nap checks, accident reports, yearly, monthly and weekly plans were all handwritten and then compiled. Paperwork stretched on after the children went home.
Attendance and extended care
Arrival, pickup, sick days, late arrivals and early leaves must be exact to calculate extended-care hours and report them, yet handwritten records are easy to get wrong.
Scattered communication with parents
Printed letters, notebooks, phone calls. No way to know whether a parent had read a notice.
Event photos hard to get to parents
Photos pinned on a board, parents writing photo numbers on an envelope, staff collating and printing by hand.
Headquarters couldn't see its facilities
Companies running several nurseries had to collect attendance, staff and planning data from each site.
How a day at the nursery changed
Drop-off
Parents sign a book at the door; teachers count and copy it onto the attendance sheet.
Tap the child's name on the entrance tablet and the arrival time is recorded. The door can open by face recognition for registered parents.
Activities and photos
Event photos printed and pinned up; parents fill in an envelope to order.
Teachers upload photos in bulk; the system resizes and watermarks them. Parents browse, save favorites and pay online.
Nap time
Sleep checks written on paper, round by round.
Nap checks recorded on the device for each child, with history and printable records.
Notebooks and health
A handwritten notebook for every child; temperatures and checkups kept in separate books.
Notebooks, class posts, temperatures and health records entered in one place; parents read them on their phones.
Pickup
Sign out in the book; extended-care hours added up by hand at month-end.
Tap the tablet at pickup. Status and extended-care time are calculated automatically, with PDF/Excel summaries.
Plans and reports
Yearly, monthly and weekly plans drafted in Word and Excel; headquarters gathers files from each site.
Plans built from templates, imported via CSV and exported to Excel in the required formats; headquarters sees attendance for every facility on one screen.
One app per role, one shared set of data
Teachers
Teachers and directors at each facility- Attendance, each child's status, extended-care hours
- Notebooks, class posts, event photos, notices with read tracking
- Nap checks, temperatures and 8 health-record types: body measurements, dental, eye, vision, ENT, urine, general checkup, vaccinations
- Accident reports (with a location diagram), near-miss and incident reports; PDF statistics
- Yearly, monthly, weekly and daily plans and individual plans from templates
Parents
Parents and family members, on their phones- Receive notices, read notebooks and class posts
- Browse, save and buy photos; pay by card or with prepaid tickets
- Health records, vaccinations and growth charts for their child
- Send messages, tell staff who will pick up; invite relatives to a family account
- Register a face photo for entrance access
Nursery-chain headquarters
Companies operating several facilities- Attendance and extended-care hours across all facilities
- Staff directory with bulk CSV/Excel import
- Shared plan templates, internal notes, Google Sheets sync
Service operator
Bunbu's client- Manage companies, nurseries and parent accounts
- Inbox for messages from nurseries and parents, help center
- System-wide notices, purchase history
Entrance tablet
Shared device at each facility- Pick a class, tap a child's name to record arrival and pickup
- Optional 4-digit PIN per child, so only the right family can check in or out
- Registration sheet with a QR code per child so parents create their own accounts
Growing with the nurseries, year by year
Launch: attendance, photos and communication
Check-in tablet, photo sales, attendance sheets, notebooks and notices. Health records, temperatures and nap records followed later that year.
Secure entrance and payments
Connected face-recognition cameras at the entrance; parents register their own photo and teachers approve it. Added prepaid photo-download tickets with receipts, and the new-school-year rollover.
Education plans and safety management
Yearly, monthly, weekly, daily and individual plans in the required formats; accident, near-miss and incident reports; an overview for headquarters; contact forms.
Operations and continuous improvement
Day-to-day operational support and new development as requirements evolve:
- Faster notice and notebook screens as years of data accumulate
- Improvements to attendance, individual plans and edit history
- Daily backups, error and server-resource monitoring
What the client gets beyond the software
We know Japanese childcare
Parent–teacher notebooks, nap checks, individual plans, yearly guidance plans, near-miss reports. We work in the teachers' own terminology.
A partner for over 6 years
The same team since the first release, so we know the reason behind every feature and change it safely.
Paperwork in the right format
Plans, health records, accident reports and attendance sheets exported to Excel/PDF in the formats nurseries already use.
Connected to outside services
Card payments, face-recognition cameras, Google Sheets, cloud photo storage.
Children's data handled with care
Permissions by role and facility, account change logs, daily backups.
Mainstream tech, easy to take over
Ruby on Rails, React, MySQL, AWS S3, automated tests and API documentation.
Organizations facing a similar challenge
This solution suits care facilities that keep daily records for each person, communicate with families and report to a head office.
Are your teachers still writing records after the children go home?
Our first conversation focuses on your current work, not a software demo. Afterwards, you receive:
- A map of your current day: records, communication and reporting
- A list of paperwork that can be digitized, ranked by impact
- A proposed phase-1 scope and expansion roadmap