Occupancy Monitoring and Breaking Even

Do you know how many children you need at each session to cover your costs?

No childcare business can realistically have 100% occupancy for 100% of the time, but by monitoring occupancy it can very quickly be spotted what the trends are within the childcare business and enable early interventions to be taken before this becomes an issue that may threaten the provision's sustainability.

This briefing note provides a basic introduction to occupancy monitoring, working out what the actual take-up was (how many children attended the session) compared with what the occupancy level could have been (how many children there was space for), the importance of this and how to do it.

These example occupancy monitoring template sheets accompany this document.

Knowing your average occupancy figure also helps when it comes to setting the fee structure for your childcare business.  The advantage of knowing the break-even point is that you will know how many children you need to attend and what fees you need to charge to break-even and anything over and above this will result in a profit for the business, which we would always recommend in order to support business sustainability.  This briefing paper on breaking-even provides a rough formula, with an example, on how to calculate your break-even point.