Everything a school runs on, in one place
Firstep is being built in stages, and this is the full picture we are building toward. Verified check-in, the daily summary, immunization records, and ratio tracking come first — pilot schools help decide the order of what follows.
Check-in and check-out you can stand behind
The record a licensing inspector, a custody attorney, or a frustrated parent might one day ask you to produce.
- Your choice of verification. Enable an on-site code scan, a location boundary around your building, or both. It is a per-school setting, not a platform-wide rule.
- Codes you control. Rotate the scan code whenever you want, and set how long it stays valid — up to a year.
- A PIN on every action. Auto-filled when a code was scanned, typed manually when only location was confirmed, and hashed the same way a password is.
- Authorized pickup list per child. Kept separate from who has an app account, because the right to collect a child and the right to see their feed are not the same thing.
- Front-desk fallback. Staff log entries for anyone present without a phone. Tagged as staff-entered, never disguised as something else.
- No remote check-out, ever. A parent cannot mark a child as collected by someone else from across town.
Parents stop asking how the day went
Three layers, each scoped differently, so families get what they care about without drowning in notifications.
- The room feed. Any parent with a child in that room sees the room's full day — check-ins, teacher posts, photos, and category-tagged updates.
- The daily summary email. Narrower on purpose: only content where their own child was tagged. Sent automatically at your end-of-day time to every linked guardian.
- Immediate alerts, by category. Parents choose which categories notify them right away — meals, naps, mood, learning, potty — with separate push and email switches.
- Safety always gets through. Incident reports and emergency broadcasts ignore notification preferences entirely. Those are not updates a parent should be able to silence.
- Every guardian, not just one. Summaries and alerts reach each linked parent account, so co-parents stay in sync without forwarding anything.
Photos and updates that stay in the right room
Teachers post to their own classes. Nothing goes school-wide by accident.
- Class-scoped by default. A teacher sees and posts to their assigned rooms only — not the whole school, and never another location.
- Categories that mean something. Activity, food, medical, mood, potty, sleep, learning, performing art. The tag drives both the daily summary and whether it fires as an alert.
- Two-tier photo consent. Appearing in the room feed is part of enrolling. Using a child's photo on your website or social media is a separate, genuinely optional permission.
- Optional annual re-consent. Turn on a yearly re-confirmation of photo choices, or leave the original consent standing. Your call, per school.
- Photos stored off the main server, behind private storage with short-lived access links and location metadata stripped on upload.
The records your license depends on
Licensing paperwork is a different problem from data privacy, and it is usually the one that shows up unannounced.
- Incident and injury reports. Structured — what happened, witnesses, action taken, who filed it — and delivered to parents immediately regardless of their notification settings.
- Digital acknowledgment. Any one linked guardian can attest they read the report; the rest can still view it.
- Immunization records tracked per child, so a status question does not mean digging through a binder.
- Medication administration log. What was given, when, by whom, and under whose authorization.
- Live staff-to-child ratios. Check-in data already knows who is in the building, so each room's ratio is computed in real time and flags staff before a limit is crossed.
- Emergency broadcast. Evacuation, lockdown, closure, severe weather — pushed through every channel at once.
Tuition billing without the spreadsheet
Your rates, your rules, and a balance every family can actually see.
- A billing account per child with its own rate, credit balance, and payment history.
- Credits and discounts applied as their own line items, so a family can see exactly what changed and why.
- Card and bank payment through Stripe, on a recurring schedule or as one-off charges.
- Paper checks still work. Log a manual payment against a child's account and the balance stays accurate.
- Reminders before it is late — at invoice creation, three days before the due date, on the due date, and once your own grace period has passed.
- Card and bank details are never stored on our servers. Stripe tokenizes both; the numbers never touch our database.
- Reporting by family, by room, and school-wide, for your bookkeeping rather than ours.
Built to run more than one school
Multi-campus support is in the architecture from the first line of code, not bolted on after the fact.
- Each campus stays its own island. Grouping locations under one owner never merges their family, child, or classroom data.
- Admin accounts can span campuses when you ask us to link them. Teachers stay tied to their own school.
- Bill separately or as one invoice. Combined billing pools the enrolled-child counts into a single calculation, which usually costs less than billing each site on its own.
What we are deliberately not building
There is no live chat — messaging is an inbox, so nobody expects an instant reply at 9pm. There is no public-facing page for your families' data; the app is authenticated end to end. And there is no way to check a child out from the web, because a check-out should mean somebody was actually standing there.
See whether it fits your school
Tell us your enrollment and how you handle sign-in today. If Firstep is not the right fit yet, we will say so.