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Every year, brightwheel publishes a back-to-school roadmap of brand new features and enhancements the team is building for you. Now we're thrilled to unveil the official list of 23+ features we've rolled out for you this summer and fall — ready to use and designed to make your experience even better!
3 highly anticipated features now available
1. Staff time off
Thanks to feedback from customers like yourself, you are now able to track paid and unpaid time off for all staff. Now, time off events automatically show up on schedules, and staff will be able to see their total paid and unpaid time off hours directly in the brightwheel app.
This means you can now track hours, run payroll, and record time off all in one place. You’ll spend less time managing staff records and more time focusing on what is most important to you.
2. Expense management
Over the last few years, brightwheel has built a robust platform for automated tuition payments. Now, we’re building out a full-fledged financial management offering by first enabling you to track, categorize, and report on expenses.
Available in early 2025 for all premium customers, you’ll be able to automatically track your expenses in brightwheel by connecting your bank account or credit/debit card. And no more paper receipts! You can save them digitally in brightwheel. You’ll also have access to Profit & Loss reporting to understand where your money is going, and you’ll be able to customize your chart of accounts with customized categories and general ledger (GL) codes.
This means you can now bill families and manage expenses all in one place. You’ll spend less time on bookkeeping and more time focusing on your top goals this year.
3. CACFP Daily Claimed Meals Report
We know how important it is to easily pull daily claimed meal count to maximize CACFP reimbursements. A brand new report, CACFP Daily Claimed Meals, is now live in brightwheel and enables providers to quickly run a report and see meal counts with the appropriate maximum counts allowed per student, per day.
The complete back-to-school roadmap for 2024
Below are all the features we've rolled out for you this back to school season 🙌. Click the links below to explore how you can start taking advantage of these fresh, hot-off-the-press improvements right now.
Billing and finances
- Year-end tax statements
- Toggle billing notifications
- Edit and void credits
- Yearly and quarterly payments
- Billing only staff role
- Edit billing plans
- Improved and new reports:
Staff and family management
- Payroll
- Time tracking updates
- Spanish app and help center translations
- Parent directory
- Photo and video gallery for families
- Staff Time Off for schedules, tracking, and pay
Learning and curriculum
- Student portfolios
- Lesson plans: improved printing options
- Observations on web
- Experience Curriculum new monthly kits and themes
- Get started with Experience Curriculum in brightwheel today
Site management
- Forms enhancements
- Fillable PDF forms
- Pre-fill for incident reports
- Reshare, search, filter, and delete a form
- Attendance updates
- Faster check-in/out flow
- Easier error flagging and correcting
- Audit logs
- Missing signature requests
- Staff permissions: enable and disable parent messaging
- Improved and new reports:
- Attendance, enrollment, staff, multi-site
- Enhanced CACFP meal reporting and logging
- Custom student profile fields
Coming Soon
The brightwheel team looks forward to delivering even more value to programs like yours this year and beyond 🎉. Expect to continue to see the platform improve so you can save more time, get paid faster, enhance program quality, and build stronger connections as an early education leader. Be on the lookout for more coming soon to:
- Admissions
- Easily create admissions packets (formerly known as processes) with a guided flow that includes the ability to write a welcome message for prospective families
- Share admissions packets with prospective families directly via a link
- Expense Management
- Automated expense tracking and receipt management
- Detailed view into your cash flow with easy-to-use dashboards and reports
- Quickly pull your P&L
- Bulk invoice management
- Add upcoming invoices to the ‘At-a-Glance tab’
- View what invoices will be posting soon
- Review and edit upcoming invoices before they're sent to families
Hear brightwheel’s CEO, Dave Vasen, speak to this year’s roadmap
Hear from brightwheel’s CEO, Dave Vasen, as he shared insights into this year’s roadmap. Please note that some features mentioned in this roadmap have since been modified or replaced with alternative updates.
Dive deeper into what the brightwheel team has built by watching this on-demand webinar featuring Dave, brightwheel’s Founder, and CEO. (You might recognize him from Shark Tank. 😊)
How to stay up-to-date on when back-to-school features go live
Stay informed about new features with the Product Spotlight Newsletter, sent to all brightwheel Premium administrators. The newsletter is sent both via email and directly in the brightwheel app.
You can make sure you’re subscribed to newsletter emails by filling out this form, and you can learn more about how to view in-app updates here.
Brightwheel is the complete solution for early education providers, enabling you to streamline your center’s operations and build a stand-out reputation. Brightwheel connects the most critical aspects of running your center—including sign in and out, parent communications, tuition billing, and licensing and compliance—in one easy-to-use tool, along with providing best-in-class customer support and coaching. Brightwheel is trusted by thousands of early education centers and millions of parents. Learn more at mybrightwheel.com.
