HomeZone...what is it?

HomeZone®

Every Family, Educator, and Nanny joining HG Kids can use HomeZone. Briefly, HomeZone is our online Database and Timesheeting System.

Home Grown Kids is the only Early Childhood Home-Based Education Company in New Zealand with a fully automated online Timesheet and Payroll system. With other services, you will have to fill out paperwork on a weekly or fortnightly basis, and then send it in. Some services use email, most are still using snail mail (NZ Post!). Our system is by far the quickest and most reliable.

The advantages with HomeZone are many, one of which is that you can change your hours instantly, no more waiting for someone else to 'ok' the changes. This speeds up things for everyone, especially Educators with many children enrolled. It puts you in charge of your hours.

So, how did we do it?

History

Back in 2006, we decided that we wanted to investigate a way of automating our entire operation. What we wanted was 'one' system that would receive Timesheet hours from Families and Educators, automatically process them, pay wages for our Nannies, access our financial system to update Family accounts, process invoices, and record our claimable hours for the Ministry of Education, all at the click of a mouse!

We contacted a software developer in Auckland, who promised the earth, but delivered very little, and after nearly 2 years of frustration, delays, excuses, and blatant story telling, we decided to cut our losses and move on.

Once again after looking around and talking to a lot of companies, and being quoted costs varying from the reasonable to the ridiculous, we chose a local developer.
6 months later, after much planning, changing, testing, and changing again, we have what we wanted.

What is HomeZone?

Our HomeZone system has been specifically written for us, and this one system does it all:

• It’s an online Database, containing all our Families, Nannies and Educators details and we can access it from anywhere in the country, as can our staff. This makes us faster, more efficient and accurate. It also saves us time and allows us to do our job better, which is looking after you.
• It’s a wage processing system, that collects information from the gateway in our website, processes and records the information, and automatically pays our Nanny Families.
• It’s an accounting system, that links to our accounting software and updates our customers accounts automatically.
• It’s a funding system that records our enrolled Children’s contact hours with their Nanny or Educator, and automatically fills out the paperwork required by the Ministry of Education and claims our funding for us.

Now what used to take our office team over a week to process, takes less than a day. We still have to do some manual changes, that will always be the case, but we are now able to use technology to make our work a great deal easier.

Perhaps the biggest change is that our Families and Educators no longer have to fill out paperwork each fortnight and post or fax it to us, everything is done online. And in most cases, a Family can have their Timesheet done in less than 15 seconds, and that includes logging on! It takes our Educators a little longer as they have multiple Families and Children, but for them it’s also much quicker.

• No more paperwork
• No posting or faxing
• No waiting for Timesheet changes to take effect

What could be easier!