Fill the gaps from your waiting list

A waiting list tells you people want a place. It doesn’t tell you whether you can take them, what they would be worth, or which of them you should ring first. Plan them into the room and the planner answers all three.

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Step 1: Go to the year with the gap

Usually that is Next year, after the September moves. Here the baby room is empty: everyone moved up to Toddlers and nobody has been booked in behind them.

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Step 2: Add the first child

Click Adjust on the room with the gap, and fill in the child as you would book them.

• Starting — when they would actually begin. For a September intake, 1 September.
• What to call them — a name you’ll recognise. “Ruby H (waiting list)” beats “child 1”, because when Ruby is really booked in you need to know which change to take out.
• Date of birth — the real one, from their enquiry. It decides their funding band in each term, when they’d move up a room, and when they’d leave for school.

Everything marked * is needed before the change can go in the plan. Then build their week. Each session row carries its own days, price list and funded hours, and every day shows what the family would pay for it. The panel at the bottom prices the whole year before you commit: what it is worth, split between families and the council. Add to plan, and do the next one.

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Step 3: Add the rest, and watch what each is worth

One change per child, so each carries its own figure. That is what makes a waiting list sortable. Read down the column:

• A full day, Monday to Friday child is worth £22,008 a year.
• A morning, Monday to Friday child is worth £11,004.

Which is the useful answer, and the obvious one only in hindsight: three full-timers are worth more than six part-timers who fill twice as many spaces at your busiest moment. When you ring down the waiting list, ring the full-time families first.

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Step 4: Stop when the room stops you

Add one child too many and the planner says so — while you are still filling in the form. Once added, the room carries an amber bar with the fix and its cost. That is the real limit on a waiting list: not the room’s places, but the adults on the rota. Here the room has 12 places but two adults at 1:3, so six children is the ceiling until somebody else is rostered. Add staff puts exactly the shift it suggests into the plan so you can see whether the seventh child pays for the adult they need — see staffing the year you have planned.

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Step 5: Read the whole answer

Open Your changes for the plan on one screen. Seven children and the adult they need are worth £94,613 a year between them. And the year’s profit: From −£100,169 to −£5,555. Filling the baby room recovers almost the whole hole — and tells you plainly that it doesn’t quite close it, so there is a conversation to have about the rooms above it too.

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Step 6: Save it and work the list

Save the plan — “Filling Babies from the waiting list” — and use it as your call list. As each family really books, they appear in the baseline on their own, and you remove their planned stand-in. The total in the bar shows you how much of the gap is still open.

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Things worth knowing

• One change is one child. It’s tempting to add “6 children” in one go, but then you can’t tell which ones to take out as they book, and you can’t compare a full-timer with a part-timer.
• Different days, not just different children. Try a child on Monday–Wednesday against one on Thursday–Friday: whichever days your room is emptiest is where the next child costs you no extra staff at all.
• The waiting list is not counted anywhere in the planner — not in the room numbers, not in the income. Everything you see from it, you put there.
• Check the effect on the rooms above. A baby booked in September 2027 moves up in 2029. That is beyond what the planner shows, but the moves panel makes the pattern visible a year at a time.