Your First Week Checklist

Roles: Owner, Director

A finished setup gets you a center and one room. It doesn't get you a running system. Five things do, roughly in this order.

Start by inviting your staff, from the Staff page. Assign each person a role based on what they should actually be able to do — see Understanding Roles if you're not sure where someone fits. They'll get an email to set a password and join.

Next, import a task list template from the Templates page. Pick one that matches a real routine your center already runs — Morning Opening, Evening Closing, Playground Safety, and several others come built in. Importing creates a fully independent copy, so customizing it afterward never affects the original.

Then schedule that list to a room from the Task Lists page, with whatever recurrence it needs. Daily for an opening checklist. Monthly for a fire drill log.

After that, decide which tasks actually need manager signoff. Not every task does — reserve it for the ones where a checkbox alone isn't enough proof something happened correctly. Full detail on how this works is in Requiring Manager Signoff on a Task.

Last, if you're on Pro: set ratio standards for each room from the Rooms page. Without a standard configured, Rounds has nothing to check compliance against — it can log a headcount, but it can't tell you whether that headcount is actually in ratio.

A center that's done these five things by the end of week one has staff who understand their roles, at least one checklist genuinely running on its own, and a documented ratio standard. That's the difference between having the software and using it.