Business Email for a Daycare or Nursery: Parents and Enrolment

Parents judge a daycare on two things they can see from the outside: how it handles their money and how it handles their child's information. Both arrive by email. Invoices and funding paperwork on one side; incident reports, photos, allergy notes and closure notices on the other. A setting with its own domain and a few clear addresses looks organised before a parent has ever visited, and it keeps the records an inspector or an insurer will one day ask for.

Quick answer

Create office@, enrolment@, billing@ and parents@ on your own domain, plus name@ for the manager and the deputy. Send anything about an individual child from the manager's name@ to that family only. Send closures and newsletters to parents one family at a time or with every address hidden. Keep incident reports in writing. All of it is free on OquMail.

The addresses to create

• enrolment@yoursetting.com for enquiries, waiting lists, registration forms and funding paperwork. A group with the manager and the office. The waiting list is the business; the enquiry answered the same day is the place filled.
• billing@yoursetting.com for invoices, fee questions, late-payment notices and government funding claims. A mailbox read by whoever does the accounts. The billing address guide explains the separation.
• parents@yoursetting.com as the address parents write to about day-to-day things: absences, pick-up changes, questions. A group with the manager, the deputy and the office, so a 7 am absence email is seen before the register.
• office@yoursetting.com for suppliers, the regulator, insurers, staff matters and formal letters. A mailbox with one archive.
• name@yoursetting.com for the manager and the deputy. Room staff work through the role addresses.

Writing to parents

Three rules. First, anything about one child goes from the manager's or deputy's own mailbox to that child's family only: incident reports, behaviour notes, medical updates, fee arrears. Second, anything to all families, closures, newsletters, policy changes, goes one family per email or with the addresses hidden; a "reply all" that exposes two hundred parents' addresses is a data breach and a reputational one. Third, photos of children are only sent to the child's own family, and only where the consent form says so. The privacy address guide explains why a privacy@ address is worth having even for a small setting.

The emails you send every week

• Enquiry reply, from enrolment@, within a day: available days, fees, the next open session, and the registration form attached.
• Invoice, from billing@, with the child's name and the month in the subject line. Arrears reminders from the same address, firm and kind.
• Incident report, from the manager, the same day: what happened, what was done, who saw it, and a request to acknowledge. A phone call first, the email after.
• Closure notice, from office@ to all families with addresses hidden: the date, the reason, whether fees are affected. The closure templates cover planned holidays; weather closures are the same email sent faster.
• Weekly or monthly update, from the manager, addresses hidden, with the things families actually read: menus, themes, what to bring.

Set it up in an afternoon

1. Add your domain in OquMail and paste the MX, SPF and DKIM records at your registrar. The DNS checklist has the exact values.
2. Create parents@ and the manager's name@ first, then a name@ mailbox for each person who writes to clients.
3. Create the shared addresses as groups and add the right people as members. Each member gets a copy in their own mailbox, so nothing waits on one person.
4. Set a signature on every mailbox in webmail: name, role, phone, and any licence or registration number your field requires.
5. Put the new addresses on the website, the booking or contact page, the social profiles and the email signatures, then stop giving out the personal ones.
6. Turn on two-factor authentication for every mailbox, not just the owner's. Client data is what makes your inbox worth stealing.

Mistakes specific to the trade

• Staff using personal addresses for parents. It breaks the record, and in many countries it breaks the safeguarding policy too.
• Group emails with every parent visible. The single most common complaint families make about settings online.
• Incident reports by phone only. The insurer, the regulator and the parent all need the written version.
• Funding paperwork in office@ mixed with everything else. Keep it in billing@ where the accountant can find it at claim time.

Common questions

Do room leaders need mailboxes?

Usually not. Room leaders write daily notes in the app or the diary; the manager and deputy write the emails. If a room leader runs a baby room with its own parent communication, give them a mailbox and add them to parents@.

How do I send a closure notice to 150 families quickly?

From office@, in batches, with every address in Bcc or one family per email through the API. The free plan allows 250 sends a day per mailbox, so a single mailbox covers the whole setting in one go.

Should the nursery app replace email?

The app is good for daily notes and photos with consent built in. Keep email for anything formal, anything about money, and anything you may need to produce later; the app's export is rarely as simple as a mailbox search.