Most owners look at one occupancy number: the centre average. It's the number your accountant asks about, and it's the least useful number in the building.
A centre running “85%” can hide a Toddler room at 70% that's been quietly under-filled all year — fully staffed, lights on, three spots empty every day. End of financial year is the natural moment to find those rooms, because you're already in the P&L and the new CCS rates land in a fortnight.
Here's the review. It takes about an hour with your enrolment data in front of you.
1. Occupancy by room, not by centre (15 minutes)
Pull enrolled days against licensed capacity for each room, for each day of the week. Not the centre average — the room-by-day grid.
What you're looking for: rooms persistently below the centre average, and days that sag across every room (Fridays, usually). A room that's full Monday to Wednesday and half-empty Thursday and Friday isn't a marketing problem. It's a matching problem — and it's usually fixable with the families you already have or the ones already waiting.
2. The staffed-but-empty count (10 minutes)
For each room, ask one question: would filling another spot require another educator?
If the answer is no — you're inside ratio with your current roster — that empty spot is close to pure margin. At typical fees, one filled spot can equate to $500+ a week in revenue with no change to your biggest cost line. Count those spots across the centre. That number, multiplied over a year, is the size of the prize.
3. The six-month age-out forecast (15 minutes)
List every child whose birthday takes them out of their current room's age range before December. This is the part almost nobody does in June, and it's why September gets ugly.
Each age-out is two things at once: a vacancy you can sell in advance, and a placement you need to find. If three Infants age up in October and your Toddler room is already at capacity, you have a problem you can solve calmly in July or chaotically in October. Same problem, very different week.
4. Waitlist freshness (10 minutes)
When did you last confirm each waitlist family still wants a place, and which days? If the honest answer is “when they enquired,” assume a meaningful share have already enrolled elsewhere. A waitlist you haven't verified isn't a pipeline — it's a list of names.
Flag anyone you'd want to offer a spot to in the next six months and confirm them this term, before offer season.
5. Fees against the new CCS settings (5 minutes)
The new CCS rates apply from 6 July. You don't set fees off the hourly cap, but you should know where your fees sit relative to it — it changes the out-of-pocket story you'll be telling families at the next increase. (We've broken this down separately — watch for next week's post.)
6. One decision (5 minutes)
A review that ends in a list of observations changes nothing. Pick the single highest-value fix — usually either “fill the Thursday/Friday gaps in one room” or “pre-sell the October age-out vacancies” — and put a name and a date on it.
What good looks like
The owners who run this review every June tend to walk into January intake with their room map already drafted, their waitlist verified, and their highest-margin spots identified. The ones who don't tend to discover all of this in late September, when the options have narrowed and the waitlist has gone stale.
The maths of acting early isn't subtle. The hour is the cheapest part.
Floreo runs this review continuously — room-by-room occupancy projected months ahead, every age-out flagged, and prioritised suggestions for who to place where. See your own centre in it: 30 days free, no credit card.