Manage your co-op's class rosters, waiting lists, authorization of caregivers to work in the classroom, and more. Easily customize user access for teachers, other staff, and parents.
Automate your co-op's tuition accounting, tracking, and invoicing. Easily add scholarships and volunteer discounts.
Optional: Automate tuition collection using E-Payments.
Track your co-op's Parent Jobs, Immunization Requirements (for students and parents), Background Checks, Parent Contract and Forms, Comfort Kits, and more.
To support parent-involved early childhood education,
by providing professional software specifically designed
for running a co-operative preschool.
Jovial was inspired by our desire to spend more time in our community of co-op kids and families, and less with burdensome back-office tasks.
Jovial makes it easy for parents to access their child's up-to-date class roster, communicate with teachers and other parents, and pay their monthly tuition.
Jovial automates most of your school's recordkeeping requirements -- forms, immunizations, background checks, etc. Jovial helps you run your co-op professionally.
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better. It's not.
Yes!
Jovial is designed for parent-run cooperative preschools. Jovial tracks parent jobs, participation in the classroom, and more. Jovial also tracks in-class work requirements such as background checks, TB tests, CPR training, and Safety/Earthquake training.
Every co-op is different. Jovial is highly customizable to your school's unique requirements.
Jovial works with almost any accounting system, including Quickbooks.
Jovial is not designed to replace your existing accounting system. You will continue to run payroll, pay vendors, track budgets, report out, etc., using all of your current accounting practices. Jovial only replaces "accounts receivable" with respect to the families in your school.
Jovial makes it very easy to transfer your summarized receivables into your existing accounting system on a periodic basis (such as monthly).
Jovial is a collaborative tool designed to help everyone at your school with their job. Jovial provides various levels of access appropriate for staff, teachers, and parents, depending on their job. For example, teachers may only be allowed to view and edit class rosters.
A typical school will have one or more people designated as "administrator" who will be able to manage user access, view and edit all content, etc.
Jovial is easy to use and does not require IT expertise. We will help you set it up to work for your school.
Yes! Jovial has a "Family Portal". The Family Portal can be used to view billing information, make tuition payments (with optional E-payments), access up-to-date class rosters, check pending in-class requirements, review contact information, and more.
Jovial uses Rackspace, one of the world's top cloud infrastructure providers. Our standards for data safety meet or exceed industry standards:
If you decide Jovial is not for your school, it's easy to download your data into an Excel-compatible format (CSV) at any time, and take it with you.
Once we setup your Jovial account, we will hand-hold you through all the initial customization. Everyone's needs are different, but these are the typical things you can either do yourself, or we can help you setup:
Jovial was proudly founded by Hermann and Helen Calabria, co-op parents, based in Seattle, Washington. We are on a social mission to improve preschools by providing very high-quality software at a very low price. Jovial is free to non-profits.
The inspiration behind Jovial was the combination of wanting to be involved with our co-op preschool, along with the daunting realization of the "time-suck" involved in all the backoffice work. Hermann and Helen felt the little time available for the co-op was better spent working in the classroom, supporting teachers, meeting prospective families, planning community and social events, or fundraising.
Hermann put his software engineering skills to use, and created the very first version of Jovial for his personal use only (as volunteer treasurer). Soon, other co-ops in the area started to show interest in Hermann's project. The feedback was so gratifyingly positive, Hermann and Helen decided to offer Jovial to any nonprofit co-op preschool that wants it.
Sustainability is important to Hermann and Helen. Jovial is very high-quality software, relying on decades of software engineering experience. No shortcuts are taken, and special efforts are made to ensure a user-friendly, beautiful experience.
Read our first Letter to Our Stakeholders
Hermann and Helen's family have gained so much from their co-op experience. It is their sincere hope Jovial is able to positively impact the nationwide preschool co-op community.
We are happy to answer any questions you may have. Please fill out the “Get Started” form below, and we will respond to you by phone or email within 2 business days.
Jovial is offered at no cost to non-profit preschools. 501c3 status required. U.S. only.
(Yes, free!)
We also offer optional E-Payments on a per-transaction fee.
Jovial is fantastic! It has streamlined the entire registration process for our school and helped us manage our class rosters and other information in a practical and user-friendly way. The ability to customize the software to make it work for individual schools is so helpful and the customer service has been amazing!
Katie R. Vice Chair of MembershipJovial has revolutionized how our co-op tracks tuition and enrollment - it's so easy to use. Before we had different paper and online documents for everything. Now all our information is in a central place, beautifully laid out and intuitive to use. It has saved us so much time so that, as volunteers, we can work on improving our program rather than tracking payments and other details.
Kathryn W. TreasurerIf you have questions or want to start using Jovial at your preschool,
please complete the form below. We will respond within 2 business days.