Records for Licensing

Centers must be licensed by the Department of Social Services. For this they must maintain health history, immunizations, health insurance, emergency contacts, authorization for release, and various permissions, and family data - names, address, phone numbers and date of birth, etc.

Here is the document for the State of California.

All states are predominantly the same, but some minor differences are there.

Records for Subsidies

For subsidized children, centers also must maintain the vouchers and records as prescribed by the funding agency. For example, United Way asks them to maintain demographics data such as household income, race, number of people in household, parents’ marital status, and ethnicity.

In iCare such fields are called user-defined fields, UDFs. UDFs allow the user to customize the software and track any type of information they want.

Not only does iCare allow the centers to add any number of UDFs but also through notifications automate the process of forcing parents to complete the records themselves.

About User-Defined Fields and Documents

• Any number of fields and documents can be added
• The UDFs can be organized in sections (pages)
• UDFs can be of any type - text, memo, integer numbers, currency, date, and Yes/No
• Text fields can be can converted to list boxes so only desired text can be entered
• Desired documents can be uploaded by the parents or the administrators
• UDFs and documents can be made to be required, in which case, through notifications parents will be forced to enter them before they can enroll their child in a program
• Google Forms can be documents in iCare

Change History (Audit Trail)

There is one more topic related to recordkeeping. The topic is change history or audit trail. In iCare a lot of change history is stored. Change history allows the user to recover from mistakes and watch for malpractice.

Change history tells us who did what when.

Example: A child was checked-in at 8:03 am from the Lobby by the parent. Attendance data will show that the child was checked-in at 8:03 am. The Audit Trail will show the parent's name, data source as Lobby, and time of recording as 8:03 am.

Another child came at 8:07 am but the parent did not check her in. At 9:00 am, using the attendance editing page, the teacher checked the child in for 8:07 am. For this case, the attendance data will show that the child checked in at 8:07 am. However, the Audit Trail will show the teacher's name, source as system entry, and the time of recording as 9:00 am.

Here are some of the things on which we keep change history:
- Original attendance records and their edits
- Original accounting transactions and their changes
- Family data
- Registration and enrollment data
- Meal records