Who they are
LutinRouge is a SaaS platform for nurseries and early-years settings, covering the full operating cycle: enrolment, parent contracts, attendance, invoicing, staff management and multichannel communication with families. Each setting runs in its own isolated tenant.
More than 70 nursery settings run on it, from single micro-crèches to multi-site operators — the largest running roughly twenty sites from one account structure. Not a pilot, and not a demo: staff record attendance in the morning and parents expect to see it, and invoices go out monthly against contracted hours.
The challenges
Childcare software looks simple from outside. It is a scheduling, billing and compliance system with no tolerance for being wrong, used by people who did not choose a career in software.
Eight time zones. Mainland France, but also New Caledonia, French Guiana, Martinique, Algeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Madagascar. Attendance, opening calendars and invoicing periods are all date-bounded, so a platform spanning Pacific/Noumea to Indian/Antananarivo cannot treat local time as a display preference. Every date boundary is a correctness problem.
Billing that has to reconcile. Invoices are computed from contracted hours against recorded attendance, with absences, closures and medical exemptions all changing the arithmetic. Parents notice errors immediately, and they are the wrong people to be debugging with.
Group operators are the harder case. Multi-site chains need shared administration with strict per-site isolation, and reporting that rolls up without leaking between settings.
No convenient maintenance window. Across eight time zones there is no hour when every nursery is closed, so deployment has to be uneventful.
Where we fit
We deliver the platform end to end — the Symfony back end and API, the Flutter apps — one for staff on the floor, one for parents following their child’s day, the realtime messaging between staff and families, and the AI layer including the chatbot that answers parent and manager queries without a human in the loop.
We also run it: infrastructure, deployments and incidents.
That last part is why this engagement carries weight beyond its sector. We carry the pager on a production system with real users and real consequences — which is the honest test of the AI-augmented delivery practice we bring to aerospace clients. The methods get proven here, at production scale, before they reach a certified environment.
The platform itself is at lutinrouge.eu. The full technical teardown lives on the LutinRouge showcase.