KA Teams
The staff console, and the hub the other apps read from. Staff directory and leave, class allocation, student records, parent–teacher meetings, report cards, learning goals and a shared activity library.
Case study
Four apps running a
preschool group.
Kinder Arena is a multi-centre preschool and childcare group in Malaysia — several legal entities, around 100 staff, and roughly 1,400 children on the books. It runs day to day on software we built.
Full disclosure: Kinder Arena is our own group — Aderick's partners run it.
It is our first customer, and we think that is the point. We are on this platform every
working day, which means we find the problems before a client would.
The situation
A preschool group is several businesses wearing one name. Each centre has its own registration, its own staff roster and its own set of books, but parents, teachers and the people running the group all expect to see one organisation.
Kinder Arena ran the way most groups this size run: spreadsheets for enrolment and staffing, WhatsApp for parent communication, paper forms for attendance and leave, and a general-purpose accounting package that could keep each entity's books but could not show the group as a whole without a manual consolidation every month.
What we built
Four applications sharing one data platform, each aimed at a group that actually uses it.
KA Parents
The parent portal. Daily updates, photos and videos from the classroom, announcements, fee reminders and push notifications — replacing a sprawl of WhatsApp groups with one record per child.
KA Attendance
Daily check-in and check-out for every child, on the floor and on a tablet, feeding the same records the office and the parent app read.
KA Finance
A multi-entity general ledger built for how a group is actually run: invoicing and receipts, customer deposits, petty cash, uniform stock, bulk payment files for CIMB BizChannel and JomPay, multi-currency, and consolidated reporting across every entity without a month-end scramble.
How it is built
React and Vite on the front end, Firebase underneath — Firestore, Auth, Storage, Cloud Functions and Cloud Messaging — with the parent app published to iOS. It is a deliberately small stack. A group this size does not need a data centre; it needs software that two people can keep running and change quickly when the business changes.
What it took to get right
The hard parts were never the screens. They were the rules underneath: teacher-to-child ratios that differ by age band, a financial year that does not start in January, fee structures that change mid-term, statutory payroll deductions, and the fact that a child who leaves and comes back is the same child. Generic software gets these wrong quietly, and you find out at an audit or an inspection.
Why this matters if you are not us
None of these problems are unique to Kinder Arena. Multi-entity books, ratio-driven staffing, fee collection, parent communication, statutory payroll and Malaysian e-invoicing obligations are the same problems at every group of this shape. We have solved them in production, under real regulatory pressure, with our own money at stake.
Running something similar?
Tell us where it hurts. We will tell you honestly whether we can help.
[email protected]