Early years professionals work incredibly hard to maintain high standards of childcare and at the same time focus on business productivity. Tim Taylor, sales manager speaks to NMT about how eyworks can help streamline your nursery management

First, can you tell us about your background and your career within eyworks?

I joined eyworks in February 2016 as a member of the sales team and have progressed to manage the team and oversee sales operations. When I joined the business we were in the early stages of becoming a household name among early years settings with our eylog software and it has been fantastic to be directly involved in the introduction and sale of our other software over the past six and a half years.
Prior to eyworks I worked for Milton Keynes City Council selling school support services to primary schools. After four years of sales growth the opportunity to work within the early years sector was a key reason behind me leaving the council and joining the journey at eyworks.

Why the rebrand and how does it better align with your ethos and goals?

When we started developing software products for early years in 2012, we wanted to transform the way of creating a ‘log’ for a child’s early years, so we called the first product and the company eyLog Ltd (Early Years Log).
We have come a long way since then and our newer products eymanage, eyenquiries, eyrecruit and eyengage have seen strong growth alongside eylog to become the preferred platform choice of childcare providers across the UK to streamline every nursery process.
As we continue to add more tools to save nurseries precious time, cut down on their paperwork and reduce their overheads, we felt now was the right time to bring our platform under a new unified name and we are excited to announce that we have rebranded the company as eyworks.

Detail the key features and how they support the early years sector?

Our platform is designed in a way that offers early years settings a single integrated software solution to allow all information to be stored and accessed in one place.
However, we feel it is extremely important to provide settings with the flexibility to choose the combination of software which works best for them while always providing the full feature package of any product they purchase so that every setting can benefit from our platform. This ensures that owners, managers and practitioners have access to the software products they need to assist in their day-to-day work, while always having a direct communication link to the parents of children at the setting. The platform is currently made up of six products:

• eymanage – our nursery management superhero which brings child records and staff HR files together to allow managers to keep on top of child occupancy and space availability in direct comparison to staff rotas and ratios, manages nursery financials for both invoice income and payroll expenditure, and provides accurate future forecasts
• eylog – our first software to capture every young hero’s story through learning journals, framework assessment progress reporting, daily diaries, accident sheets and medicine forms
• eyenquiries – our superhero enquiry sidekick that automates the enquiry process, from the initial parent registration of interest through our online enquiry form, to managing parent visit bookings and sending out visit reminders, and capturing the child registration details on a fully customised online registration form
• eyrecruit – helping early years settings find their next superhero employee by simplifying every stage of the recruitment process from job advert creation to publishing roles across multiple online job boards, offering customisable candidate application forms and managing candidates through a recruitment pipeline
• eyengage – assemble a formidable setting community by building relationships with parents and staff by sharing posts, capturing their thoughts through polls and advertising events directly with them and encouraging live discussion to grow that feeling of family across the members of your setting
• eyparent – for unbeatable parent engagement all information shared through the eyworks platform feeds directly to our dedicated and free parent app to really treat the parents as partners in your setting while empowering them to book extra childcare sessions, log accidents and capture activity photos from home.

What specifically sets you apart from others in the market?

Our award-winning software is built by people who understand how nurseries work as we listen to the most important people in our business, the early years superheroes that use our platform.
Through our customer days, eymentors group and eymeets webinars, we regularly take feedback from customers to drive development across our platform to keep being the best we can be.
Our customer first focus feeds directly into our platform licensing model with settings able to choose the combination of software which works best for them. From recruitment, enrolment and financials, through to child development and community engagement, eyworks streamlines nursery processes so that they can focus on what really matters – making memories with the little ones.

All of our customers receive the full feature package at an affordable cost as our unique licence pricing is based on their enrolled child numbers so they can benefit from all software features regardless of size.

Goals for 2023?

As we move into 2023, we continue to develop the eyworks platform to ensure we meet the ever-changing needs and requirements of the early years sector as we look to further enhance our standing as the preferred platform choice of childcare providers.