Shift-Work Client

I am starting up a daycare in the near future, and have a family who is looking to start with me. As they work shift work, they will require before school care some days, then after school care other days. There may be full-day care days (though rare), and possible overtime or extra unexpected care days. There will be some days where there will be no care provided, as their shift will allow them to care for their child themselves. Any advice on how I should charge them? I want to cover myself in the contract, and have a clear rate guideline to offer them at the upcoming interview, but am unsure on how to handle this. Thanks!

Setting fees and contracts is such a personal thing - you will get a dozen different answers on how people will approach this because we all have different philosophies around what is 'fair' based on our business models and required income to make this worth while for our families!

Depending on where you live and what are the restrictions on the number of children you can care for in your program? So for example in Ontario we can only ever have 5 children in care at one time - so if we have a child coming before and after school or 'flex' they are basically in ONE SPOT in our program because it gets very hard to find another child to 'share' a flex spot. Therefore taking on a client such as this is going to mean a loss in income from that space ... some people who offer it therefore choose to charge a much higher 'rate' for that service to offset that lost income but they enjoy the 'quieter' days when that child is not in their space and they are not earning income that day while others just choose NOT to offer that kind of service and opt for a permanent full time or a consistent part time like Tuesday / Thursday so they can off set the off days easily with a Monday / Wednesday / Friday client thus keeping their income more steady.

What is your 'budget' for how many children you need in your spaces paying fees in order for your business to be viable ... so for example some providers need the income from all 5 of their clients and therefore in order to consider offering this service the client would have to pay for the full time space and other providers budgets allow for them to only need 3 daycare children's income so 2 of their spaces could be 'flexible' with the income from those spots and based on their budget and perhaps philosophy for having been there and done that with needing 'special care' they can be more flexible in fees for those services to help out clients who cannot afford to pay higher rates and so forth.

My personal philosophy is that a space is a space in my program .... if over the course of the schedule you need care Monday - Friday and need that space available to you on a rotating basis that 'changes' than you are in a FULL TIME SPACE and therefore your fees reflect that.... my income is capped at the 5 clients I can legally serve in Ontario and my fees are set based on the revenue I need from those 5 clients over the course of the year to make to ensure that after expenses I have an income that is viable to continue to do this.

My program spaces are therefore 4 full time clients and only 1 'shared' space option which has a highly daily rate attached to it for the times during which the opposite space sits open and to cover the additional cost of providing part time care (aka twice the laundry for that space, twice the storage needed for that space, twice the special occasion gifts and craft expenses for that space, etc) ... I do not offer flex care unless the client is willing to pay for the full time space.

That said I have a client on enrollment who is on a rotating schedule - they send their child everyday and dad uses the days he is home during the day to either sleep if he has worked the night shift or to to catch up on chores if he was on afternoon shift and the child comes a shorter time frame on those days verses when the mom has to come pick up and the child is than here the full 9 hours.