Early Childhood administrative Services

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Your Early Childhood Service isn’t quite like other businesses out there… The ECE sector has regulations and nuances which are completely unique over any other industry.

From my experience supporting business owners in multiple industries, running an Early Learning Centre is probably one of the most complex.

This means you can’t outsource your bookkeeping, payroll and other admin tasks to just anyone. The person you trust with this job needs to understand these unique differences;

✅ they need to pick up when a child’s hours have changed but WINZ payments haven’t,
✅ know which resources should be coded where for your budget reporting,
✅ or when your team have had a meeting but you’ve forgotten to pop it in the roster.
✅ understand family needs and struggles
This is where Zesty Virtual Assistants step in. We understand bookkeeping, and better yet we have a wealth of knowledge in Early Childhood Education Sector with Heidi being a qualified Early Childhood Teacher. This means we completely understand your service and all the different elements which go into creating an amazing space for families to bring their children.

On average you spend…

6 hours Bookkeping

invoicing, checking for late payments, reimbursing teachers expenses, and tracking expenses for budgets.

2 hours on Payroll

following up with inaccuracies, amendments, relief teachers and leave changes.

2 hours on admin

General office admin is time which could be spent speaking with parents, leading your team & providing meaningful teaching experiences with the children

What if you could save at least of 40 hours every month?


It’s time to outsource to a team who intimately understands the
Early Childhood Sector

Book a Discovery Call >

Have you ever been worried about bringing in an external person to carry out the administration role, because you weren’t sure if they would understand important concepts integral to ECE such as;
✅ Confidentiality
✅ Sensitivity to whānau needs
✅ Philosophy
✅ Tikanga & Te Ao Māori

Keep reading…

Here at Zesty Virtual Assistants,
we understand your ECE service isn’t quite like other businesses.

For your families: you need to make sure the settling in process is smooth, invoices are received on time, and the onboarding tasks are carried out with the same level of professionality as your team work with the children.
For your team: you need to track non-contact time, professional development, room budgets are clear, and expense claims are repaid in a timely manner.
For your financials: you need to make sure your books are reconciled regularly, budgets are up to date, reports are able to be created easily .
That’s a lot of time taken up with just the basic bookkeeping and payroll, and we haven’t even touched on business planning, managing new enquiries, updating the website… there’s a lot go do!

Our Zesty team supporting you and your centre

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Heidi Wruck
Owner
BA (Education) & BTeach (ECE)

Heidi is Pikler/RIE trained through Childspace Early Learning Centres and gaining her Pikler Level 1 Certificate at the Lóczy Institute under Anna Tardos.

While living in London Heidi mentored four childcare services through the introduction of the UK’s ECE curriculum, with Jagonari Muslim Woman’s Centre gaining moving from “Requires Improvement” to “Outstanding” in their Education Review as a direct result of Heidi’s mentoring while supporting the team to hold onto their own culture and traditions through the process.

Heidi has always had a nouse for business and this has showed through her different ECE roles and into running several businesses over the last 10+ years. As a visiting teacher for an in-home ECE service, part of the role was carrying out networking and marketing with local communities and spreading the word about the service provided. Following on from that role, Heidi began her own in-home service in between having her first and second children.

After a period of raising her boys, Heidi’s husband fulfilled a lifelong dream of purchasing a butchery. Heidi’s role in the business was all the bookkeeping, HR, online marketing, social media website creation and more.

When creating Zesty Virtual Assistants, it was important for Heidi to combine all the life skills of mentoring and running businesses to support others in their business journey. It’s not always easy, it’s not always glamourous and it’s often hard work, and that’s what makes it all the more rewarding!

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Renee Thorstensen
Virtual Bookkeeper

Renee is currently working to complete her Bachelor of Business (Accounting), and has a phenomenal amount of experience having worked 6 years as an assistant accountant as well as various other bookkeeping admin roles.

Renee has gained so much experience in the accounting and finance industry with main tasks including cash flow management, bank reconciliations, GST & PAYE filling, accounts payable and receivable, IMS payroll for 250 employees, stock control, support for multiple branches and general administration duties.

With Zesty, Renee has worked closely with our existing ECE clients and is experienced with Discover, and carrying out Discover tasks such as exporting teachers info for payroll.

Get started working with us

Discovery Call

Book a Discovery Call and we’ll chat about what’s happening for you in your business and how we can help.

Book Here

Onboarding Call

Once you’re happy with the proposal and we’ve signed a contract, we will sign into all of the tools we need to carry out the tasks.

Onboarding Package

We begin with the starter package for the first 2-3 months, digging into the work, streamlining processes and tidying everything up.

Maintenance Package

With everything streamlined and us completely understanding your business, you move to an ongoing package customised specifically for the tasks you need completed.

So what are you waiting for?
We all know what you’d rather be doing with your time!


FAQs

Yes! Aside from my work as a teacher in Wellington ECE settings, as an acting manager to a centre in Rotorua, and as a mentor to the London centres as mentioned above, I was also a visiting teacher supporting in-home educators, nannys, and CYFS foster parents. All of these roles came with a variety of admin work, including WINZ applications, and supporting families with their paperwork.

After my son was born, I created Butterfly ECE as an in-home care service. The photo at the top of the page is my son during this time! As this was my own business, I was in charge of my own invoicing & bookkeeping, making sure WINZ documentation was signed, and adhering to the regulations for In-home ECE services.

Recently we carried out the bookkeeping and payroll for a prominent Johnsonville centre, while they looked for an in-house administrator. During this time we streamlined the processes for bookkeeping and payroll so much we went from an expected 80 hours a month to an average of 20 hours a month. This was a phenomenal saving for the centres immediate budget and ongoing costs of the administrative role.

Currently we are working with Alice, owner of Backyard Kids. We’ve been with Alice since the beginning of her centre owning journey. We set up and streamlined her bookkeeping and payroll process, carry out daily reconciliation, check over GST before filing, follow up on outstanding bills, inform her of outstanding parent payments, and carry out other ad-hoc tasks such as budget support, editing customer-facing documents etc

We can provide a variety of services; starting from bookkeeping and payroll, to adapting your existing employment contracts, through to updating your digital/online marketing and all those other office tasks you don’t have time to do yourself. We can provide a variety of tasks, and we will customise a package to suit your needs.

For more information, please book a discovery call with me and we’ll talk about what you specifically need for your ECE service.

Since Covid, there have been huge advancements in the tools available to create virtual or remote working opportunities. With the majority of tools now “in the cloud” multiple people have access to these tools. Xero, payroll tools and Discover have all been created with this in mind.

As for the hardcopy invoices and receipts, it’s up to you how you want to manage these. You can post them to us and we’ll file them for you and return the folder when it’s full, or we can teach you how to scan/take a picture and upload it and how to best file it. It all depends on what process will work best for you and your team.

For more information, please book a discovery call with me and we’ll talk about what you specifically need for your ECE service.

Your service package is customised to your specific business needs. We start with an onboarding package which gives us time to audit what’s happening, streamline and tidy up everything, as well as get to know you and your way of doing things. Once we are through this stage, we move you to a maintenance package accounting for all your specific needs.

For more information, please book a discovery call with me and we’ll talk about what you specifically need for your ECE service.

You may have seen above that I have titled myself “Owner & Virtual Business Manager”. Often called an ‘online business manager’, my role is to support your business with more strategic and plannable actions; we discuss your business goals together as well as make sure you have everything you need to run your business well.

My Virtual Assistant team carry out the actions of those tasks; the daily bookkeeping or payroll. Another example could be, if you’re about to redesign a new outdoor area, my team could put together the questionnaire that would go out to parents for consultation, update the website, write the newsletter, and create the social media for it.