Daycare is about paying for a spot - not the hours of actual care. IMO, she should be happy she found anyone who would take her for that kind of schedule and not charge her FULL TIME fees. Just think about it - if she is attending on a willy nilly bases on different days each week and each month then you are actually losing income because you can not fill those alternate days she is not in attendance with another child. And you can't fill the "blanks" she leaves because it is impossible to find another family who will just come when YOU say they can.

What she wants is called flex-care. And two things have to happen in this situation with regard to fees:

Option A - she pays full time fees because she technically needs to come any of the five days per week.

Option B - she pays far more per day than your usual rate. So, for example, if your usual fee is around $32 a day (which, looking at your numbers posted seems about your daily rate) then she should be paying $40-$42 a day to come flex. AND, if you use this option she should also be committed to a MINIMUM number of days per month that she HAS to pay for regardless of attendance. You will find that if you allow parents to come when they please with no commitment there WILL be months (let's say on the parents vacation or over December when everyone takes a lot of time off over Christmas etc) that the child might only attend one or two days or not at all! Then you lost out income for a whole spot that month ($650 in your case). I would say a minimum commitment of 2 or 3 days a week.

Trust me, BTDT with flex care. I have told the story before but the short version of my experience with flex care is that early in my daycare career I accommodated a flex family and over the course of 5 years I lost $28,000 in income because I allowed them to come willy nilly and pay as they went. Learn from MY mistakes. They pay for a spot or.................. NEXT!

Pick an option and stick with it but do NOT allow her to just come and pay hourly. That is not fair to you. You are running a business and should not have to lose income because a parent doesn't want to pay what's fair. Why should SHE save money and you lose it?? Are her bills more important than yours?