Bill drop-in families a daily rate
Charge a flat rate for each day a child attends, with nothing billed for the days they don't — the usual arrangement for drop-in and casual care.
Drop-in families don't fit a weekly or monthly plan. They come when they need you — twice one week, not at all the next — and they expect to pay a day rate for the days they actually came. A daily rate plan does exactly that: one flat charge for every day the child attended, and nothing for the days they didn't.
Where to find it
There's no separate "daily" billing interval, and looking for one is the usual reason people don't find this. A day rate lives inside the attendance-billed plan type, because it works the same way underneath: NestliCare reads the days your staff checked the child in and out, then prices them. The only difference is what it charges per day.
So the path is Plan Type: Hourly, by attendance, then Rate is: Per day.
Create the plan
- Go to Billing & Payments → Billing → Billing Plans.
- Click Create Plan.
- Name it something the parent will recognise on an invoice, like
Drop-in day rate. - Under Plan Type, choose Hourly, by attendance.
- Under Rate is, choose Per day.
- Fill in:
- Rate per day (required) — what one day of care costs, e.g. $45.00.
- Invoiced (required) — how often to send the bill: Weekly, Bi-weekly, or Monthly. This is only how often the invoice goes out; it never changes the rate.
- Click Create Plan.
The plan card shows the rate as $45.00 per day attended, invoiced weekly with a by attendance badge, so it's obvious at a glance which of your plans are driven by real attendance.
Attach it to a child
A plan bills nobody until it's on a child's enrollment:
- From Families & Children, on the child's card, use Add tuition plan.
- Or from Organization → Rooms, edit the enrollment and pick the plan under Tuition plan.
Both places show the plan as $45/day, and you can do this from the iOS and Android apps too.
Daily plans attach to a child's room enrollment. They can't go on an add-on program — program fees aren't driven by check-in and check-out, so use a fixed plan there.
What gets billed
When the period ends, NestliCare walks the days that child attended:
- Every day with a check-in and a check-out is charged the full rate.
- How long they stayed makes no difference. Half an hour and nine hours are both one day at $45. That's the point of a day rate.
- Days the child was absent add nothing.
- If they attended nothing at all in the period, no invoice is created for it.
The invoice line names the number of days and the rate, and each day is listed underneath with the hours the child was actually there, so a parent asking "what am I paying for?" gets a straight answer:
Maya Okafor — Drop-in day rate (Preschool Grove) — Week of Aug 2 — 2 days @ $45/day
Sibling discounts and subsidies apply exactly as they do on any other plan, after the days are priced.
Review before sending
Daily invoices are always created as drafts, even when Auto-Send is on for the rest of your billing. Real money is coming out of attendance records, so a person looks first.
If a day has an attendance problem the draft is flagged, and one case is worth understanding clearly:
A day with no check-out is billed at $0, not the day rate. If a teacher forgot to sign a child out, NestliCare doesn't guess the charge — it bills nothing for that day and tells you why, so the invoice is visibly short rather than quietly wrong. Fix the check-out on the child's attendance (Fix an attendance mistake), then open the draft and click Recalculate from attendance. The day picks up its $45 and the flag clears.
A day NestliCare auto-closed for you (check-in recorded, check-out inferred at your usual closing time) is charged the full rate — the child was there, and with a day rate the exact departure time doesn't change the price. It's still flagged so you can confirm.
When invoices are generated
Daily plans bill after the period ends, because the days don't exist until then:
- Weekly — every Monday, for the previous Monday to Sunday.
- Bi-weekly — every other Monday, for the previous two weeks.
- Monthly — on the 1st, for the month that just ended.
Generation runs in the morning in your center's timezone. Fixed plans are unaffected and keep billing in advance, so a family with one child on a fixed plan and another on a drop-in plan gets two invoices the same morning, covering different periods. That's expected, not a duplicate.
You don't have to wait for the schedule — Generate on the Invoices page runs it on demand.
Per day or per hour?
Both are attendance-billed and behave identically apart from the pricing:
| Per day | Per hour | |
|---|---|---|
| What you enter | A rate per day | A rate per hour |
| A 30-minute visit | Full day rate | 0.5 hours |
| A 9-hour day | Full day rate | 9 hours |
| Daily max | Not applicable | Optional ceiling per day |
| Rounding | Not applicable | Exact, or round up to 15/30/60 min |
Pick per day when the price is the same however long they stay; pick per hour when time in care is what you're selling, like before and after school care.
Troubleshooting
No invoice was created for a drop-in child. They had no complete attendance day in that period. Check they were signed in and signed out on at least one day. A period with no attendance produces no invoice by design.
A day is missing from the invoice. Almost always a missing check-out — that day bills at $0 and is flagged on the draft. Fix the record, then Recalculate from attendance.
A child stayed twenty minutes and was charged a full day. Working as intended for a day rate. If short visits should cost less, an hourly plan with a daily max gets you closer: it charges for time in care but never more than the cap.
We want to charge half-days. There's no half-day rate. The nearest fit is an hourly plan with a daily max set to your full-day price, so a short day costs less and a long day tops out at the day rate.
Switching an existing plan to per day. You can change it on the Billing Plans tab. If children are already on the plan, NestliCare asks you to confirm, because it changes how their next invoice is worked out. Any daily max and rounding on the plan are dropped, since they don't apply. Invoices already generated keep their amounts.
The parent's app shows the rate oddly. Older versions of the iOS and Android apps show the invoice and its total correctly but label the plan's rate with "/hr". The invoice line itself still reads 2 days @ $45/day. Updating the app clears it up.
Related
- Bill by the hour from attendance — the per-hour version of the same plan type
- Create a billing plan — flat-rate plans, and attaching plans to children
- Auto-generate invoices on a schedule — the schedule these plans ride on
- Charge a late pickup fee — a per-minute fee past your cutoff, on the same weekly draft
- Fix an attendance mistake — correcting check-outs before you recalculate