Nursery operating system
Nurtalo brings attendance and ratios, daily care, learning, family communication, admissions, workforce, finance and compliance into a single system built for early years settings across the UK.
Who builds this
Nurtalo is built by a small group who spend their time with managers, room leaders and administrators rather than with market research decks. We sit in on morning handovers, watch a medication round being signed off, and listen to the phone call a manager makes when a child has not arrived. Then we build the smallest honest thing that makes that moment less fragile.
The operating day
Nurtalo is organised around what actually happens in a setting, from the first arrival to the last collection. The times below are a typical full-day setting; yours are yours to configure.
07:00
The rota, expected children, booked sessions and overnight absence notices are already in one place, so the first hour is not spent reconstructing the day from messages and paper.
07:45
Children are registered in as they arrive, room by room, with the adult who brought them recorded where it matters. Headcount and staffing awareness update from what has genuinely been entered.
09:30
Nappies, sleeps, meals, room moves and observations are recorded at the moment they happen, by the person who was there, against child, adult and time.
11:15
Accidents, incidents, medication rounds and concerns are handled as proper safety records with authors, timestamps, follow-up and family acknowledgement, not as a note in a group chat.
15:30
Daily summaries, learning moments, newsfeed posts and messages are shared deliberately, each with a named audience and a truthful sent state.
18:00
Outstanding work is visible rather than remembered. The register, care records, family updates and finance all describe the same day.
Attendance and staffing awareness
Signing a child in takes one tap from the room screen, and the headcount changes in the same breath. Nothing is inferred from a booking: if an adult has not recorded an arrival, Nurtalo says the arrival is unknown rather than quietly counting the child as present.
Families
Families see what the setting decided to share, when the setting decided to share it. Nothing is broadcast automatically, nothing is shared because a checkbox defaulted to on, and a message that is queued on a phone in a basement room says so instead of pretending to be delivered.
Groups and multi-site
HQ shows how the group is doing: occupancy, outstanding checks, staffing pressure and finance, setting by setting. Drilling into a person-level record is a deliberate act that respects the same permissions as the setting itself, and it is written to the audit trail.
Built for the whole setting
Practitioners, managers and families each get a surface suited to what they need to do, working from the same underlying record.
Recording should take seconds and never pull an adult away from the room for longer than it has to.
A priority-led view of what needs attention today, and evidence you can produce without a scramble.
One place for daily care, learning, permissions, invoices and messages, with permissions the nursery controls.
Platform areas
Each area shares one record, one permission model and one audit trail. Nothing is a separate product bolted on afterwards.
Registers, room presence and live headcount, with staffing awareness derived from what has actually been recorded.
Structured daily care, medication authorisations and administrations, allergies and health alerts.
Observations, next steps, weekly planning and assessments linked to children and to your chosen framework.
Threads, announcements, polls, newsfeed posts and daily summaries with explicit audiences and receipts.
Enquiries, visits, offers, onboarding tasks and session requests in one pipeline that feeds the register.
Staff records, site assignments, shifts, leave, supervisions and qualification evidence.
Billing accounts, fee plans, funding entitlements, invoices, payments and allocations.
Checks, policies and acknowledgements, plus tightly restricted safeguarding casework.
Organisation-wide oversight across settings with deliberate drill-down and enforced scope.
Where we stand
These are commitments we can be held to, not usage figures collected from other people's settings.
Honestly
Not a feature list. These are the moments managers describe to us when we ask what actually goes wrong.
| What happens | Paper, chat and spreadsheets | With Nurtalo |
|---|---|---|
| A child has not arrived | Someone checks the paper register, then the booking sheet, then asks the room, then finds a message from 06:40 in a group chat. | The register shows the arrival as unknown, the family's absence notice is on the same record, and the follow-up has an owner. |
| Medication at midday | A signature on a form in a locked drawer, transcribed later, hoping the second signature was collected. | An authorisation from the family, an administration recorded at the time by a named adult, and a witness where your policy requires one. |
| An inspector asks for evidence | An evening of collating folders, photographs of forms and a spreadsheet that has been edited by four people. | The operational record is the evidence. Filter the period, produce the export, and every entry still has its author and time. |
| A family asks what happened today | A verbal handover at the door, then a call at 19:00 because the detail was not written down anywhere. | The day's care record is already shared with the audience the setting chose, and the thread stays with that family. |
| Invoicing with funded hours | A spreadsheet of entitlements, a second spreadsheet of sessions, and a reconciliation nobody enjoys. | Sessions, entitlements and fees sit on the same record, so the invoice describes the attendance that was actually recorded. |
Evidence and trust
Tenancy, permissions and audit are product features in Nurtalo, not background plumbing that nobody looks at.
Implementation
We would rather sequence a move carefully than promise a one-click migration that nobody can honour.
How many settings, how many places, which sessions and funding types, and which parts of the current day cause the most admin.
A scoped proposal covering settings, modules, timing and what is not yet built, so nobody is surprised later.
Organisation, settings, rooms, roles and permissions configured with your own vocabulary before anyone is invited.
We are direct about what transfers cleanly from your current system and what has to be re-entered or checked by a person.
Practitioners record in Nurtalo while the old process is still available, so confidence is earned rather than assumed.
Families are invited once the setting is ready, with permissions and audiences agreed before anything is shared.
Questions
Set up your nursery and explore late collections, medication rounds, room moves and family communication in your own workspace. No card details are needed to start.