A Childcare Platform Replaced Manual Sign-In Sheets With Face-Recognition Attendance Across Four User Roles

Not One Interface for Everyone

We ran a Design Sprint with the client before development started, to define user personas, prioritize features, and work out mockups. Teachers and parents would use this daily, many of them not especially tech-comfortable, so each portal needed to be intuitive from the first screen.

• Standard web portals for Super Admin and Center Admin, built for full management capability.
• A responsive Teacher portal for marking attendance and pulling reports from a phone, tablet, or desktop.
• A cross-platform Parent mobile app for iOS and Android, so a report, event, or invoice was one tap away.
• Guardian-level access nested under parent accounts, with permission logic kept out of every individual feature.

A Scan, Not a Signature

We implemented face-recognition attendance using Exadel CompreFace, an open-source, Docker-based recognition engine, for both teachers checking in and parents dropping off or picking up their kids. Every teacher and parent uploads face photos from a few angles up front. For parents with multiple kids enrolled, a scan prompts a quick selection of which child is arriving, replacing the daily pen-and-paper sign-in sheet.

Funds Land in the Right Account

We integrated Stripe and Stripe Connected Accounts for subscription billing and center-to-parent invoicing. Every center gets its own Connected Account, so funds transfer automatically from parents to that specific center's bank account on a fixed schedule, with no platform operator sitting in the middle of every transaction. We also built a Classroom Transitions feature: an algorithm checks birth date, enrollment date, and class criteria to decide when a student is ready to move to the next class, and prepares the notifications for everyone the transition affects.

Communication That Doesn't Need Anyone Watching It

We built a rich-text post and newsletter system on SendGrid, with cron-job-based scheduling behind it, so a center admin composes a newsletter once and picks the date it goes out. For chat between parents, teachers, and admins, we used Firebase Cloud Messaging paired with Firebase Functions for push notifications, a lighter integration than a full messaging platform for a feature that only needed to do one thing well. The whole system runs on a microservices architecture, so a bug in the newsletter service cannot take down attendance tracking for every teacher checking kids in that morning.