Ratios
How RoundUp works out whether a room is in ratio, what the alerts mean, and what to do when a room drifts.
How the number is worked out
Open More → Ratio Monitoring. Directors, assistant directors and admins can open it, and it refreshes on its own while it's on screen. For each classroom RoundUp counts the children checked in today, counts the staff clocked in to that room, and works out how many staff those children need under your state's rules.
Children count in the classroom on their profile, or in the room they've been moved to for the day. Staff count in the Room they chose when they clocked in — not the room they're assigned to. Someone in the building but not clocked in doesn't count, and neither does someone clocked in to All rooms. That's how a licensor would read it too.
The requirement comes from the ages of the children present, worked out from their dates of birth. If you've entered a Student-staff ratio for the room that's stricter than your state's, RoundUp uses yours; a looser one is ignored. If RoundUp doesn't have rules for your center's state, rooms show No data rather than a guess.
Compliant, at risk, out of ratio
| State | Means | Do |
|---|---|---|
| Compliant | More staff are clocked in to the room than its children need, or no children are checked in. | Nothing. |
| At risk | Exactly as many staff as the children need. One adult stepping out puts the room out of ratio. | Line up cover now, while it's cheap — this is the useful alert. |
| Out of ratio | Fewer staff than the children need, nobody clocked in to a room with children in it, or more children than your state's maximum group size allows. | Bring in an adult or move children immediately. |
The state that earns its keep is At risk. Out of ratio is a problem you already have; at risk is the two minutes before you have it.
Alerts and acknowledging
When a room is at risk or out of ratio, RoundUp notifies the center's director-level staff and posts to your Slack or Teams channel if you've connected one. Each alert lands under Recent alerts, which covers the last seven days. Tap Acknowledge so the team can see someone has it. Acknowledging doesn't fix anything, and the room stays flagged until the numbers change.
RoundUp checks your ratios every few minutes on its own, whether or not anyone has the app open. That's the point: the rooms that drift are usually the ones nobody was watching. A device with Ratio Monitoring open also raises its own notification straight away, so keeping it up on an office tablet still gets you the fastest warning — it's no longer the only thing that gets you one.
A room that stays out of ratio doesn't alert every few minutes forever. The first alerts come quickly and then space out, so an afternoon of being one teacher short doesn't bury the next new problem. It keeps producing a record throughout.
Ratios count children who are checked in. A roster nobody checked out reads as a building full of children with no staff, which is genuinely out of ratio as far as RoundUp can tell — so it alerts. If you get ratio alerts overnight, the fix is the check-out, not the alert.
When a room is out of ratio
An out-of-ratio room shows two buttons. Reassign staff opens the Staff screen. Move children opens that room's roster, where a child's Move room lives. To cover the room yourself, use More → Move Room, which moves your clock-in to that room so Ratio Monitoring counts you there; see Time clock.
To move a child, long-press them in Classrooms and choose Move room. That move is temporary: the child shows in the new room until 7 PM, then returns to their home room. It's recorded for the whole center, so every device sees it and Ratio Monitoring counts the child in the room they're visiting. Directors, assistant directors and admins make the move; teachers see who is visiting their room.
For a move that has to count, change the Classroom on the child's profile with Edit profile, and change it back when the arrangement ends. And don't fix a ratio on paper: a teacher clocked in to one room while standing in another satisfies the arithmetic and nothing else.
Mixed-age rooms
Rooms holding more than one age group are governed by the youngest child present, which is why one infant in a preschool room changes the whole room's requirement.
RoundUp works this out from the children actually checked in to the room, not from the room's age range, so accurate birth dates and the right classroom on each child's profile matter more than how the room is described. A child with no date of birth on file is counted by the room's name — a room with infant in its name is treated as an infant room — so fill birth dates in rather than relying on that.
Where a state publishes a separate staffing table for small mixed-age groups, RoundUp uses it while the center's head count is within that table's limit. Oregon's applies while 16 or fewer children are present.
Ratios follow OAR 414-305-0400, the Department of Early Learning and Care's rule for certified centers. RoundUp counts a five-year-old on the preschool ratio (1:10) and moves them to school-age (1:15) at six, because a birthdate alone can't show kindergarten eligibility. The Oregon ratio cheatsheet walks through the whole table. If your center is outside Oregon, check the state in your center address is right before relying on the readings.
More: All director guides