A personal project: How I tackled the chaos of coordinating childcare across working parents, grandparents, and paid carers.
I Love a Spreadsheet, But....
Every August, the same ritual: open a new spreadsheet, copy last year's school term dates, add columns for "Mummy", "Daddy", "Grandma", "Nanna". Colour-code the cells. Send WhatsApp messages asking "Can you do the Tuesday of half-term?" Wait for replies. Update the spreadsheet. Forget to update the spreadsheet. Double-book ourselves. Argue about who said what.
If you're a working parent in the UK, you know exactly what I'm talking about. With 13+ weeks of school holidays and only 25-28 days of annual leave between two parents, the maths simply doesn't work without help. And coordinating that help? It's a second job.
So I built an app to fix it.
Challenge 1: The Data Entry Problem
The pain: Every school publishes their term dates differently. PDFs, web pages, Word documents. Some list holidays, others list term times. Some include INSET days, others don't mention them until a week before.
The solution: Putting AI to work. Simply copy/paste the link to the school's term-time website and let AI do the rest. It understands natural language like "Half term: 26-30 May" and converts it into structured data. No more manual entry of 40+ dates each year.
The challenge was that even for the same school, the term calendar dates are in a completely different format to the PTFA dates. Some use tables, others use bullet points, some have dates embedded in paragraphs. The AI needed to:
- Identify what's a holiday vs. term time
- Parse date formats (UK vs. US, with and without years)
- Group dates into periods (e.g., "Summer Holiday 2025")
- Handle INSET days mentioned separately from main holidays
Challenge 2: Getting Everyone on the Same Page
The pain: Grandparents have different availability patterns. One might work part-time. Another has hospital appointments on Wednesdays. A third can only help during summer because they travel. How do you keep track of who's helping when, and make it easy to remind them?
The solution: A visual drag-and-drop calendar. Each helper gets a colour. Drag them onto a day to pencil them in. See at a glance:
- Days with nobody lined up yet (highlighted so you can't miss them)
- Days where someone's pencilled in but hasn't confirmed
- Who's doing what across the entire holiday
I also built leave tracking for working parents. Enter your annual leave allowance, and the app tracks how many days you've used vs. remaining. When you put yourself down for a holiday, it counts against your balance.
Challenge 3: The "Odd Sock Day" Problem
The pain: Schools have events that don't fit neat categories. Non-uniform day. World Book Day costumes. Odd sock day for anti-bullying week. Sports day. Class assembly. Chicken duty rota. These all need someone to know about them and potentially attend.
The solution: Flexible event types that match real school life:
- School activities (assemblies, sports day)
- Play dates
- Clubs
- Meetings (parents' evenings)
- Appointments
Plus recurring events for weekly commitments (piano lessons every Thursday, football club every Monday). The app shows these alongside holidays so you see the complete picture.
Challenge 4: "Wait, Who's Got the Kids on Wednesday?"
The pain: You've done all the planning, but somewhere in February half-term there's a Wednesday with nobody down for it. You don't notice until the week before. Cue frantic WhatsApp messages and that sinking feeling.
The solution: The app spots the days you've missed. The dashboard shows upcoming days with no one lined up. The calendar highlights them visually. You can filter to see only "days we still need to sort."
I had to think carefully about what actually counts as a problem:
- A school holiday with nobody lined up? That's a problem.
- A school holiday where someone's pencilled in but hasn't confirmed yet? That's a heads-up.
- An INSET day everyone forgot about? Definitely a problem.
- A bank holiday? Parents are probably off anyway. Maybe fine, maybe not.
Challenge 5: When Plans Fall Through
The pain: Plans change. Grandma gets ill. A work trip gets scheduled. The childminder cancels. You need to quickly see what's affected and find someone else.
The solution: Real-time updates with simple status tracking:
- Pencilled in – not confirmed yet
- Confirmed – definitely happening
Drag-and-drop makes swapping people around instant. The agenda view shows everything in a list for quick scanning. Filter by period to focus on just "Easter 2025" when you're planning.
Behind the Scenes
Building this taught me a few things about real-world software:
Keeping Family Data Private
Every family's information needs to stay completely separate. One family shouldn't see another family's helpers or plans. I built privacy controls at the database level, so even if something goes wrong in the app, your data stays isolated and secure.
Making It Feel Instant
When you drag someone onto a day, the screen updates immediately. But what if the save fails? I had to build in proper error handling while keeping the interaction feeling snappy. Nobody wants to wait around when they're trying to sort out half-term.
Calendar Sync (Coming Soon)
The next big feature is syncing with your phone's calendar. This means your childcare schedule appears alongside your work meetings and appointments. One place to see everything.
Teaching AI to Read School Websites
Getting AI to reliably extract term dates from messy school websites took a lot of trial and error. Edge cases included:
- Dates spanning two years ("22 Dec - 3 Jan")
- Academic year references ("Autumn Term 2024/25")
- Inconsistent naming ("Spring half term" vs. "February break")
What's Next
The roadmap includes:
- Calendar sync – Push events to your phone's calendar
- Feedback system – In-app feature requests so I can build what you actually need
- Multi-school support – For families with children at different schools
- Mobile app – For on-the-go updates
Got an idea for an app? Want to learn more? Get in touch