Honest Buck Accounting

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Honest Buck Accounting provides expert accounting, tax, and advisory services for childcare providers, preschools, and non-profit schools, helping them streamline finances, save on taxes, and grow their businesses. Since 2007, Honest Buck Accounting has been committed to helping mid-size businesses make smart financial decisions through professional bookkeeping services, CFO services, and profit c

oaching. As experts in accounting and tax preparation, Honest Buck transforms messy financials into sustainable bookkeeping systems so business owners can focus on their business.

Most childcare directors watch enrollment.Most childcare owners watch the bank balance.Almost nobody watches the number ...
06/02/2026

Most childcare directors watch enrollment.
Most childcare owners watch the bank balance.
Almost nobody watches the number that sits between them and predicts both: tour conversion rate.
Industry benchmarks from LineLeader put a healthy tour-to-enrollment rate at 65 to 75 percent. We recently worked with a multi-site operator running 90 percent at one location and 20 percent at another. Same enrollment funnel. Same inquiry volume. Same staff training.
The difference was structure. At the underperforming center, nobody owned the close, tours ended in the hallway, and follow-up was inconsistent.
Here's the math most owners never run: a 10-point lift in tour conversion is worth more than a 30 percent increase in lead volume. You don't need more ads. You need a better tour.
If you're reviewing mid-year numbers this month, add three rows to your KPI tracker:
Inquiries per location per month
Tour completion rate
Tour-to-enrollment percentage
Then ask your director who owns each one.

May is Teacher Appreciation Month. Across childcare, that usually means flowers, gift cards, and thoughtful notes from f...
05/29/2026

May is Teacher Appreciation Month. Across childcare, that usually means flowers, gift cards, and thoughtful notes from families.
We are CPAs, so our take on Teacher Appreciation Month is different. To us, the most meaningful appreciation is a center that pays sustainably — that runs the math on wage increases proactively, that builds the financial discipline to absorb them, and that does not turn over teaching teams every 18 months because the wage scale never moved.
The hard truth about childcare wages is that paying teachers fairly requires solving the financial puzzle first. You cannot pay people more than the business can sustain. You can, however, model wage increases honestly, plug revenue leaks, optimize part-time pricing, pursue subsidy enhancements, and gradually raise the wage scale in step with the math.
That is unglamorous work. It is also the actual mechanism by which centers move from minimum-wage adjacency to genuine living wages over a 3 to 5 year horizon.
If your wage strategy is "raise rates when we can afford it," that is not a strategy — it is a hope. The centers we work with that have built genuine wage progression are the ones who treat compensation as a planned line item, modeled, funded, and protected from year-end pressure.
Happy Teacher Appreciation Month to every center owner doing this work.

❓A question for childcare center owners:When was the last time you ran the actual math on a hypothetical $2 per hour wag...
05/28/2026

❓A question for childcare center owners:
When was the last time you ran the actual math on a hypothetical $2 per hour wage increase across your staff?
Most owners we work with give one of three answers:
A) Never — I think about it but I have never modeled it
B) Occasionally — I have a rough sense but not exact numbers
C) Recently — I ran the math when [state mandate / staff turnover / budget review].
If you have not modeled it, here is the fastest version. Take your total hourly labor hours per year. Multiply by your hourly increase. Multiply by 1.30 for burden. That is your annual cost. Divide by your enrolled headcount and 12 months — that is the per-child monthly tuition increase needed to fully offset.
For most centers, a $2/hour increase requires a 6 to 9 percent tuition raise to offset, which is roughly two years of normal tuition increases compressed into one.
Drop your letter (A, B, or C) below. Happy to share what we typically see at each level.

State wage activity affecting childcare in 2026:💲New Mexico: HB 246 would raise the state minimum to $17/hour in January...
05/28/2026

State wage activity affecting childcare in 2026:
💲New Mexico: HB 246 would raise the state minimum to $17/hour in January 2026. ECECD enhanced reimbursement rates require $16 to $19/hour entry-level wages by quality star level. The 5-Star rate of $19/hour is specifically tied to extended-hours providers.
💲Washington DC: $17.95/hour Living Wage already in effect for childcare subsidy participants. The Pay Equity Fund benchmarks educator salaries against DC Public School teachers at $23.43 to $34.14/hour. FY26 saw a 4 to 5 percent emergency reduction.
💲Pennsylvania: HB 1549 passed the House in June 2025 and would phase Philadelphia to $15/hour in January 2026, with most other counties following by 2028. The state created a new $25M Recruitment and Retention Program paying $450/year per qualifying teacher.
💲South Carolina: Still at the $7.25/hour federal floor with no state mandate activity expected. SC has the lightest mandate pressure of any state we work in.
The bifurcation matters. Centers in NM, DC, and PA face mandate pressure that requires structural decisions. Centers in SC face the same labor market pressure without a mandate to compress against — meaning they can pay below market, but their staff are aware their counterparts in mandated states earn meaningfully more.
For our advisory clients in mandate states, the strategic question right now is whether to opt into enhanced subsidy programs that come with wage floors, or to stay on standard rates with more flexibility but less reimbursement. The math depends on the subsidy mix, the quality star level, and the local labor market.
Most centers do not run this math until the mandate is already in effect. By then, the strategic election window has closed.

https://honestbuck.com/wage-increase-childcare/

💰A $2 per hour wage increase across your hourly staff costs more than you think.For a 75-child center with about 15 hour...
05/26/2026

💰A $2 per hour wage increase across your hourly staff costs more than you think.
For a 75-child center with about 15 hourly staff (12 full-time teachers, 2 part-time floaters, 1 lead), the math looks like this:
27,040 hourly hours per year.
$2 per hour increase = $2.60 fully loaded after burden (1.30x multiplier).
Annual cost: $70,304.
For a center generating $850K in revenue, that is 8.3 percent of revenue absorbed in payroll alone. To fully offset it through tuition, you would need to raise rates 6.3 percent — almost double the typical 3 to 4 percent annual bump most centers do.
That is the math behind every state minimum wage move, every pay equity mandate, and every "we have to keep up with the market" conversation happening right now in childcare.
The owners who absorb wage increases well are the ones who run the math 6 to 12 months in advance. They use that runway to plug revenue leaks, raise tuition gradually, fix part-time pricing, and apply for state recruitment grants. By the time the mandate arrives, their labor cost ratio has barely moved.
The owners who absorb wage increases badly find out the hard way — usually when their labor ratio jumps 10 percentage points in a single quarter and the math no longer works.
I just published a full breakdown: the worked example, the state-by-state wage activity for NM, DC, PA, and SC, the six levers for absorbing the increase, and the five-question decision framework.

https://honestbuck.com/wage-increase-childcare/

When clients hire us, the first month is rarely about taxes.It is about untangling the math behind questions like:Why do...
05/22/2026

When clients hire us, the first month is rarely about taxes.
It is about untangling the math behind questions like:
Why does my P&L show profit my bank account does not have?
Why is my full classroom losing money?
Why did 40 percent enrollment growth produce 12 percent revenue growth?
These are not accounting questions. They are operational questions about a regulated industry that requires accounting answers. A generalist CPA does not know to ask about FTE ratios, slot-day utilization, or part-time per-day premiums. We do, because we have focused on working with childcare centers since 2013.
Specialization is not a marketing position for us. It is a prerequisite for actually being useful to a center owner.
If you have stared at a healthy-looking enrollment number and a sick-looking bank account, that is the kind of problem we solve every week.

❓A question for childcare center owners and directors:What percentage of your enrolled children are part-time?Most cente...
05/21/2026

❓A question for childcare center owners and directors:
What percentage of your enrolled children are part-time?
Most centers we work with cannot answer this off the top of their head. The ones that can are usually surprised by what they find — typically 25 to 50 percent of headcount, when they thought it was 10 to 15 percent.
Why it matters:
Below 20 percent — you have a manageable program. The complexity is contained.
20 to 35 percent — the operational burden is real but profitable IF your per-day premium is correct.
Above 35 percent — you are likely running an expensive headcount-driven business with FTE-driven costs. The math almost certainly does not work.
Above 50 percent — you have a structural problem that pricing alone cannot fix. Something has to change.
The other question worth asking: of your part-time families, how many are on a fixed schedule (M/W/F every week) versus a variable schedule ("3 days, we will tell you which ones")? Variable schedules destroy the operational model. They cannot be planned, paired, or staffed against. The right pricing for a variable schedule is significantly higher than for a fixed part-time schedule.
What does your mix look like? Drop a number in the comments — I am happy to share what we see across our advisory clients.

The most quoted expert on childcare business economics, Tom Copeland, recommends a 50 percent per-day premium on part-ti...
05/21/2026

The most quoted expert on childcare business economics, Tom Copeland, recommends a 50 percent per-day premium on part-time enrollment.
Most centers charge a pure pro-rate.
The difference is the difference between a profitable part-time program and a structural loss on every slot.
Run the math: a $1,250/month full-time slot is roughly $58/day. A 3-day part-time at pure pro-rate is $750/month — same per-day rate. A center fills two of these and earns $1,500 from a slot that previously earned $1,250. Sounds like a win.
It is not. 😨 Two part-time children at 3 days each occupy the slot for 6 days, but the teacher cost is the same as one full-time child for 5 days. The center loses on the day-of-week problem (children pile onto Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday and leave Monday/Friday empty), pays for the staffing inefficiency, and absorbs twice the administrative load — all for $250 more revenue.
A 30 percent per-day premium would change this. A 50 percent premium would make it genuinely profitable.
Real market data backs this up. BrightWheel's Austin pricing research shows centers in that market charging 14 to 21 percent per-day premiums for 3-day part-time vs 5-day full-time. The strongest centers we advise sit at 25 to 35 percent. Almost none of them sit at zero.
If your part-time rate card has not been audited against your actual cost structure in the past two years, this is the highest-leverage pricing review you can do.

https://honestbuck.com/part-time-daycare-enrollment/

A center director I will call Katherine grew her enrollment 40 percent last year.Her revenue grew 12 percent.She thought...
05/19/2026

A center director I will call Katherine grew her enrollment 40 percent last year.
Her revenue grew 12 percent.
She thought she had cracked the marketing puzzle. The lobby was full. The tour calendar was packed. New families were enrolling almost every week. By every visible measure, the year was a win.
Then we ran the numbers on her full-time equivalent (FTE) enrollment.
The 17 children she added produced the revenue of about 5 full-time students. Her FTE-to-capacity ratio was 58 percent — well below the 90 percent benchmark her tuition was priced for.
The hidden problem: part-time enrollment.
Every part-time family she accepted added headcount but subtracted slot-day revenue. A classroom does not get paid for how many children are enrolled. It gets paid for how many slot-days are sold. Two part-time children attending three days a week sell six slot-days. One full-time child attending five days sells five. Looks better — until you account for the empty days, the staffing inefficiency, and the per-family administrative load.
Most centers we work with are running this same trap and do not know it.
I just published a full breakdown — the slot-day math, the per-day premium most centers fail to charge, and the three questions every owner should ask before accepting a part-time family.
If your enrollment numbers look healthy but your bank account does not, this is the first place to look.

https://honestbuck.com/part-time-daycare-enrollment/

The reason we work exclusively with childcare centers is in this article we just published.You cannot answer "is your in...
05/16/2026

The reason we work exclusively with childcare centers is in this article we just published.
You cannot answer "is your infant room profitable?" without knowing:
🔣The staffing ratio in your specific state
👩‍🍼The fully-loaded labor cost in your specific labor market
💰The tuition ceiling in your specific community
☑️The square footage your licensing requires
👶The toddler room capacity downstream of the infant room
✅The conversion rate from infant to toddler in your specific center
A generalist CPA does not know any of those things by default. And the questions childcare owners face are not really accounting questions. They are operational questions about a regulated industry that happens to need accounting answers.
Since 2013, we have focused on working with childcare centers. That is the only way to know the math at this depth. And it is the only way our advisory clients trust us to model decisions that change the trajectory of their businesses.
If you are looking for a CPA who actually understands the operational realities of running a center, that is what we are here for.

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72715

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