With the recent announcement that C&K, one of Queensland's largest child care providers is moving all its child care, kindergarten and family day care services across to the Kidsoft child care management software offered by NumeroPro, it prompted the question how well are the software programs serving early childhood education and care services and which are the best?

C&K will migrate all its services to the Kidsoft platform over the next 18 months and chief financial officer Alex Allen said the Kidsoft software was chosen because it is intuitive and forward thinking.

"We see an opportunity to streamline administration performed by staff and the Kidsoft solution supports this vision. It also delivers an online wait listing solution and portal for parents and guardians to access information when and where they want it," he said.

As you know all CCB approved child care services are required to operate under the CCMS. The CCMS is not in itself a software program it is simply the system under which services provide information to DEEWR on what care has been provided, to which children and when.

Child care services must independently choose a software program which helps them meet their reporting requirements under the CCMS. The DEEWR website lists 23 approved CCMS suppliers and child care services are required to research their options and select the provider which best suits their needs. For many services this may not be as easy as it sounds.

In 2009 the Community Child Care Cooperative NSW (CCCC NSW) published a helpful guide titled CCMS: Choosing the Right CCMS Software for Your Service which tested 14 different products assessing their cost, available support and training, performance, ease of use, reporting and backup features. Much of this research (which hasn't been updated) is still relevant and the main recommendations the CCCC NSW make for services considering their options are:

When choosing your software, first you should consider your needs – Do you want a basic system that manages CCB, child enrolment and attendances? Or do you want a comprehensive system that also manages your human resources and accounting requirements? Do you want a web based system or would you prefer a locally hosted system?

Once you have a shortlist you can then start comparing products to determine which is most suitable for your service.

The CCCC NSW recommends that you consider these factors before looking at price as your choice of CCMS has a significant impact on the ease of your operating and reporting procedures.

Given that the CCMS has been in place a fair while now and early childhood education and care providers have become familiar with the new requirements and what they need to do to meet them, we are trying to determine how well the software programs available in the market meet your operational needs.

Quite often software packages don't quite deliver what they say on the box and we hope that providing a forum for discussing your experiences with the different products available will offer useful insights for services considering their options or thinking about changing suppliers.

Please take the time to answer the mini survey here and add your comments to the conversation below. We will report back in a future edition.