From nothing to your first post, in an afternoon.

Put the app on the device that will live in the room, open it, and choose Set up a new nursery. That is the account made — everything below happens in Admin, in the app, and takes about half an hour.

Sign in to your account and this list will tick itself off as you go.

1. 1

   Choose what you will use

   The register, meals, nappies, sleeps, the notice board, accidents, events, medicines. Anything you leave off never appears in the room, so a setting that only wants observations gets an app that looks finished rather than one full of buttons nobody presses. You can change your mind any time.

   Admin → Settings, in the staff app
2. 2

   Set up your rooms and your day

   Your rooms, your opening hours, the sessions you sell, and the time the end-of-day message goes out — 5:30pm unless you change it. Rooms come first because both staff and children attach to them, so doing this now saves going back over everybody later.

   Admin → Settings
3. 3

   Add your staff, and give each one a PIN

   Four digits each. The nursery stays signed in on the device; the PIN is what puts a name against every post, register mark and accident report. A member of staff without one cannot sign in at all, so this is the step worth double-checking.

   Admin → Staff
4. 4

   Add the children

   Name, room, key worker, and whether photos of them may go out. That last one is enforced everywhere — a child without consent cannot be tagged in a photo — so it stops depending on who is on shift.

   Admin → Children
5. 5

   Invite the families

   Each family gets a code for the parent app. They only ever see their own child: no group chat, and no other families’ photos.

   Admin → Children → a child → Family