Nursery operating system

Run the nursery day on one calm, trustworthy record

Nurtalo brings attendance and ratios, daily care, learning, family communication, admissions, workforce, finance and compliance into a single system built for early years settings in England.

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What Nurtalo is built around

Safety is never a paid extra. Attendance, headcount, ratios, accidents, medication, safeguarding, emergency information, consents, audit and export are base capabilities.
Honest state. Draft, queued, submitted, approved and shared are different things, and Nurtalo says which one you are looking at. Unknown is never shown as fine.
Accessible by default. Keyboard support, visible focus, readable contrast and 44px targets are part of the build, not a later retrofit.

Nursery operations

A record that follows the shape of the day

Nurtalo is organised around what actually happens in a setting, from the first arrival to the last collection, rather than around a filing structure.

Before the doors open

The rota, expected children, bookings and absence notices are already in one place, so the first hour is not spent reconstructing the day.

Expected arrivals per room, with families' absence notices applied
Rota and site assignments for the practitioners on shift
Outstanding admissions tasks for children starting soon

Through the session

Registers, room moves, care events and observations are recorded at the moment they happen, by the person who was there.

Live headcount and staffing awareness room by room
Care and learning recorded once, against child, adult and time
Accidents, medication and concerns handled as safety records

After the last collection

The day closes with evidence rather than recollection: what happened, who recorded it, what families were told and what still needs attention.

Family updates and messages with honest sent states
Compliance checks and operational logs kept as history
Reports and exports built from the same underlying record

Built for the whole setting

Different people, one shared source of truth

Practitioners, managers and families each get a surface suited to what they need to do, working from the same underlying record.

Practitioners

Recording should take seconds and never pull an adult away from the room for longer than it has to.

Large, phone-friendly targets and short recording flows
Structured events instead of retyping the same note
Clear states, so nothing looks done when it is only queued

Managers and owners

A priority-led view of what needs attention today, and evidence you can produce without a scramble.

Needs-attention work before general activity on the home screen
Ratios, occupancy, admissions and finance in the same record
Supervisions, policies and compliance checks with an audit trail

Families

One place for daily care, learning, permissions, invoices and messages, with permissions the nursery controls.

Care and learning shared deliberately, never automatically
Absence, bookings, consents and forms from a phone
Invoices and documents alongside the nursery's messages

For single-site nurseries For groups and multi-site For parents and families

The platform

Every module a nursery needs, in one place

Each area below is part of Nurtalo Web today. They share one record, one permission model and one audit trail.

Attendance and ratios

Live registers, room-by-room headcount and staffing awareness through the whole session.

Arrivals, departures and room moves recorded as they happen
Room board with present children and assigned practitioners
Ratio awareness that shows unknown as unknown, never as green

Daily care

Nappies, sleep, meals, bottles, suncream and accidents recorded once, at the moment.

Structured care events instead of free-text notes
Recorded against the child, the practitioner and the time
Shared with families only when the setting chooses to share

Learning journeys

Observations, next steps and progress kept close to the child rather than a scorecard.

Observations with photos held in private storage
Multi-child moments respect every family's permissions
Next steps and key-person reflections in one place

Family communication

Messages, newsfeed and calendar so families hear from the nursery in one channel.

Threaded messages between families and the setting
Newsfeed posts and events scoped to the right audience
Attachments delivered through short-lived private links

Admissions and onboarding

Enquiry to first day, with the paperwork gathered before the child arrives.

Enquiries, waiting list and offers in one pipeline
Onboarding tasks and required information tracked per child
Family accounts recorded and linked deliberately, never silently

Workforce and rota

Shifts, leave, supervisions and staff records that back up your staffing picture.

Rota, clock-in events and site assignments
Leave requests and approvals with a full history
Supervisions, outcomes and actions with private manager notes

Finance and billing

Fees, funding, invoices and payments handled in whole pence, never in floats.

Fee plans, sessions and adjustments per child
Invoices families can see in their own portal
Payments and credits recorded against the invoice

Compliance and quality

Checklists, policies and evidence ready when someone asks to see them.

Recurring compliance checks with named owners
Versioned policies and read acknowledgements
Operational logs kept as immutable history

Safeguarding

Concerns and chronologies held separately, visible only to the right people.

Restricted access separate from everyday child records
Chronology entries with author, time and status
Complaints and concerns tracked to a resolution

Documents, consents and forms

Permissions, policies and digital forms collected and traceable.

Consents captured per child with a clear audience
Nursery documents with versions and acknowledgements
Digital forms families can complete on a phone

Multi-site HQ

Organisation-wide oversight with site scope enforced all the way down.

Aggregate views across every setting in the group
Drill down to a site only where your access allows it
Person-level detail withheld unless scope permits it

Data governance and export

Your records stay yours: exportable, auditable and never held hostage.

Full data export as a base capability
Immutable audit of sensitive actions
Retention and access decisions kept explicit

Read the full feature breakdown

Trust and safety

Children's records deserve serious engineering

Nurtalo treats tenancy, permissions and audit as product features, not as background plumbing.

Separation by design

Every record belongs to an organisation and a setting
Access is decided from membership records on the server
Row-level security applies to reads and writes alike
Multi-site views withhold person-level detail unless scope allows it

Evidence over reassurance

Sensitive actions are written to an immutable audit trail
Files are served through short-lived private links only
Safeguarding sits apart from everyday child records
Full data export is a base capability, never an upsell

How Nurtalo protects data

See Nurtalo with your own setting in mind

We will walk through the day as you actually run it, show the modules that matter to you, and be straight about what is ready now and what is still being built.

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