Collecting Info For Childcare Photos

I am using my website for childcare photos. I have a few questions I need to ask when parents register for childcare photos, name, room etc.  I also require payment for their registration, which becomes a credit in their account.

The only way I can find to automatically apply the credit to their account is to sell them a Registration as a Collection.  In the Collection set-up there is the option for account credit to be applied.

When I ask the question as Options in the Collection, the data doesn't export into a spreadsheet in a way that makes the data easy to read or collate, the options are jumbled with sometimes 2 or 3 of the options in one column of the spreadsheet, but then for other clients they are more spread out, so all of the data from the same column isn't necessarily from the same question.  It also sometimes misses information from the second child of a family.

If I attach the questions to the product base instead of the collection, the account credit doesn't automatically apply to their account. (And I haven't had a chance to test if the data export would work any differently).

I have also found that I can add additional order fields/options to the checkout.  But there are only 5 fields available, and they only apply once to each transaction, so if a parent is registering multiple children, I would need them to checkout for each individual registration, which I feel is not convenient for the client.

Is there a way around any of this?  Am I missing something or is there a way to make this happen?

You are not going to be able to pre-sell a credit to go into their account and also collect the additional information at checkout.

You can pre-sell products / collections (packages) and collect that information at checkout: Pre-Orders 

So you could create a base package to pre-sell.

A parent could place a pre-order for each child so each child is separate.