Child-hour
A child-hour is one child on the play floor for one hour. Sessions are priced from it, floors are sized in it, and a month of costs divided by the child-hours you sold is your cost per child-hour. Count it by totalling the minutes of play you sold and dividing by sixty.
What does one child-hour mean on the floor?
Admit one child, let sixty minutes of play pass, and you have spent one child-hour. Two children for half an hour each amount to the same one unit. The measure ignores how the time was sold: a ninety-minute session, a punched pass visit and a paid extension all reduce to children multiplied by hours, so they can be added, costed and compared.
Why count in child-hours rather than visits?
Visits are not all the same size. Until it knows how long each visit ran, a venue selling both one-hour and two-hour sessions is comparing unlike things: what a visit costs to serve, and how full the floor was, both turn on length. Child-hours put every sale on one scale. Rent, staff and utilities are the price of keeping the floor open, so spreading a month of them over the child-hours sold in that month gives what an hour of play costs you, the figure behind the cost per child-hour KPI. Wages are one of the costs to spread; the staff cost calculator takes the people on shift and what they are paid and returns the wage cost of an opening hour, a child-hour and a session.
How do you count the child-hours you sold?
Total the minutes of play sold in the period and divide by sixty. On a floor run from a timer board it is one line of arithmetic: each session starts with a set length, and lengths can be summed. A session that ended early still counts the minutes bought, because the floor was held for that whole time.
Formula. Child-hours sold = total minutes of play sold ÷ 60.
How many child-hours can a floor hold?
Capacity is children at once. Multiply it by the hours you open and you have the child-hours the floor could hold in a day. Nobody sells all of them, because sessions leave gaps and Tuesday mornings are quiet, so a turnover factor sits inside the session pricing method, and the break-even calculator asks for the sessions a day you actually get. Sold hours divided by available hours is your utilisation, which the KPI guide calls average occupancy, and it is the number that decides whether a fixed cost feels heavy or light; choosing the ceiling itself is the capacity management guide's subject.
Formula. Child-hours available = capacity × opening hours. Utilisation = child-hours sold ÷ child-hours available.
Illustrative, not a benchmark: a floor with a capacity of 30, open ten hours, holds 300 child-hours in a day. If the day's timers show 9,000 minutes sold, that is 150 child-hours, half of what the floor had. Every figure here is invented.
How does a child-hour turn into a session price?
Once you know what one child-hour costs you, a session costs that figure multiplied by its length in hours, plus whatever margin you want. Extra time is priced the same way, because it is simply more child-hours: a paid extension sells them, complimentary time gives them away, and an overstay takes them without anyone deciding. The overstay and time extensions guide sets the policy for those minutes.
Where the figures come from in PlayAreaOS
The timers total the minutes of play sold for a period and Finance totals what the period cost, which leaves the child-hour arithmetic as one division on two figures the day has already recorded.
Questions
Is a child-hour the same as a visit?
No. A visit is one child coming through the door for whatever length of play they bought; a child-hour is a fixed amount of floor time. A two-hour session is one visit and two child-hours, so a venue that sells more than one session length needs child-hours to compare its costs and its utilisation fairly.
Where do the minutes to divide come from?
From the timers. Every session on the board carries a length, and the timers report totals the minutes of play sold over whichever period you are looking at, which is the figure sixty divides into.
Can I work out a cost per child-hour before I have a month of trading?
Yes, as an estimate: divide a month of fixed costs by the child-hours you realistically expect to sell, then replace the estimate with measured minutes once the floor has been open a few weeks. The break-even calculator runs the same arithmetic on your own figures.
What is the difference between cost per child-hour and price per child-hour?
One hour of one child's play costs you something to provide, and that amount is the cost per child-hour: your fixed costs spread across the child-hours you sell, plus the variable cost of serving that hour. Price per child-hour is what you charge for it, the session price divided by the session length in hours. The gap between the two is your margin on time.