PlayCentre Schedule

Hours lost to Excel every term

Playcentres are cooperatively run by parents. Every term, someone has to build a roster that assigns families to session days — and it's far more complicated than it sounds. Each member has a different education level that determines their supervisory role, some hold first aid certificates, children in the same family may attend on different days, new members need buddies, and some families use helpers on certain days.

When members changed their available days mid-term — which happened regularly — the entire roster had to be rebalanced by hand. There was no easy way to see the downstream effects of a single change: did the day still have enough qualified supervisors? Was the first aid requirement met? Did any new member lose their buddy? On top of that, playcentres must submit reports to regional administrators — daybooks, supervision plans, attendance records — and generating those from a manually maintained spreadsheet was another time sink.