"It's very challenging to run a business if you don't know what your revenue is going to be," says Chelsea Sprayregen.
But that's exactly what happened to the 17-year-old after she won the 2017 John Edwardson Social New Venture Challenge at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Sprayregen cofounded Pie for Providers, a software company that helps childcare providers manage government programs, and it was recently acquired by Canadian company Lillio.
Lillio offers products for childcare providers in the US and Canada.
"For all these programs the paperwork is overly complex," Sprayregen tells the Chicago Tribune.
"And, frankly, the systems can be punitive.
providers are afraid of making mistakes and being audited, and so they tend to lowball when they submit their invoices to the government."
In many states, childcare providers are required to account for virtually every minute of their time.
These states are committed to not paying a single dollar for any time that a child was not in care.
That's not how private childcare centers operate.
Pie for Providers helps providers maximize revenue by getting every dollar of government funding that they qualify for.
It calculates attendance following all the state's complex rules.
"The same attendance record needs to be
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In the world of social enterprises, failure is a cringe-worthy moment nobody wants to talk about. But, social entrepreneurs can benefit from their failures.