A Head Start Children’s Centre Goes 100% Paperless – and Never Misses a Compliance Check

Two award-winning Gold Coast childcare centres run enrolments, family communication, staffing and compliance entirely on IndyForms.

A Head Start operates two boutique childcare centres in Burleigh Heads and Currumbin Waters on the Gold Coast, founded by Dr Laurel Scanlan on a mission to nurture every child’s social, emotional, physical and intellectual potential in a small, homely environment.

2021 KindiCare Excellence Awards — QLD Winner. Rated 9.84/10, ranking 3rd nationally out of 16,400+ centres assessed.

Testimonial: A Head Start Children's Centres

The challenge:

Running two high-quality childcare centres generates a constant stream of paperwork: enrolments, family permissions and communications, incident and medication forms, WHS and child protection compliance, staff contracts, timesheets, appraisals and daily opening/closing checklists for every room, every day.

Before IndyForms, that volume of paper-based and scattered digital forms made it hard to guarantee nothing was falling through the cracks — a genuine risk in a sector where a single missed compliance check (an expired first aid certificate, a lapsed Blue Card, an unsigned WHS form) can mean real consequences for children, families and regulators.

IndyForms has completely changed how we run our centres. Everything — enrolments, compliance, staffing, our daily checklists — lives in one place now, and I genuinely don’t worry about paperwork slipping through the cracks anymore. We’ve processed over 20,000 documents and have more than 80 automations quietly running in the background, which means our educators can focus on the children instead of chasing forms. We’re completely paperless, and for the first time we can say we’re always audit-ready, not just when an audit is coming.”

The solution:

Every form family-facing, compliance-related, and operational — enrolments, family participation, incident and medication permissions, Blue Card and first aid tracking, WHS, daily room checklists — moved onto IndyForms across both centres.
Automated workflows route submissions straight to the right centre inbox in real time, so office staff and directors always have current records without chasing paper.
Ask Indy AI is used directly by staff — from wage summaries and timesheet lookups to “what compliance issues do I have, like expired first aid?” — and even to spin up a full new form set when opening a new service.