Knowing what my cat is doing

Security is one of the biggest things parents look for in a childcare centre. If you want to attract more families to your facility, consider having biometric fingerprint scanners installed. While this may seem like overkill at face value, fingerprint scanners have become relatively affordable and offer multiple benefits to childcare centres. Here are just a few.

Taking Attendance

If you currently take attendance at your childcare centre by having parents sign a piece of paper, you could make things a lot more efficient with biometric scanners. You can use a scanner in combination with a dedicated sign in software to quickly log parents and their arrival time. This streamlines the process for busy parents and eliminates issues like misspelled names, messy handwriting, and incorrectly written arrival times. If your sign-in process also includes some kind of identity card or tag, biometric scanners will also solve the problem of parents forgetting them, as it's impossible to forget your finger.

Signing Children Out

One of the biggest security concerns for any childcare centre is signing children out with an authorised parent or guardian. Often, sign out systems rely on either identity tokens, security codes, printed receipts from sign-in, or simply memorising faces to ensure the child is leaving with someone trusted, all of which are notoriously unreliable. Security codes can be guessed, spotted or overheard. Identity documents and receipts can be stolen or even faked by dangerous individuals. Likewise, human facial recognition isn't infallible; can you guarantee you could tell the difference between an authorised father and that father's unauthorised brother? With biometric scanners, you can ensure that only authorised individuals check a child out of your centre. Fingerprints can't be stolen or faked, so they're the most secure option.

Keeping Unchecked People Out

Most of the time, the only people in your childcare centre will be the children and the staff. However, there will be times when you'll need to let other people, like maintenance workers, into the building. Often, such individuals haven't undergone police checks, so it's important to keep them separate from any lone children. Biometric scanners can also be used for access control so you can segment areas of your childcare to keep unchecked individuals away from children if necessary without interfering with their duties.

Remember, when it comes to having biometric scanners installed in your childcare, it's crucial that you employ the services of a commercial electrician. If scanners aren't wired up properly by an electrician with security experience, they could fail or malfunction, making your facility even more insecure. If you're using biometric scanners for access control, your system will also need to be connected to your fire safety system to ensure that doors will automatically be unlocked in the event of a fire, making a qualified commercial electrician even more important.