Funded hours, and the records that have to stand behind them

Funded hours look like a payments problem and behave like a records problem. The claim itself is a form. What sits behind the form is a set of facts about codes, dates and attendance that either exist or do not, and nobody asks for them until the moment they matter.

What the entitlements are

In England there are three strands, and most settings run all of them at once.

A universal 15 hours a week for three and four-year-olds, available to every child regardless of the parent's circumstances. A 15 hours entitlement for eligible two-year-olds, based on the family's circumstances. And 30 hours a week for the children of eligible working parents, which since September 2025 has covered children from nine months old until they start school.

The weekly figures are shorthand for annual totals: 570 hours a year for 15 hours a week, and 1,140 hours for 30, both based on 38 weeks. A setting open for more of the year can offer a stretched arrangement, spreading the same annual total over more weeks at fewer hours each. A family taking 1,140 hours over 51 weeks receives around 22 hours a week rather than 30, and the annual entitlement is unchanged.

That arithmetic is worth writing down for parents, because a family expecting 30 free hours in August and receiving 22 will assume something has gone wrong.

The parts you cannot reconstruct later

Three kinds of record have to be made at the time.

The eligibility code and its dates. Working parents apply through the government childcare service and receive a code, which you validate with your local authority. Eligibility is reconfirmed by the parent every three months. What you need on file is the code, the date you validated it, and every reconfirmation date since. A code that was valid when a term started and lapsed mid-term is a real situation with real consequences, and it is only visible if you recorded the dates rather than the status.

Attendance, session by session. A claim is a statement about hours delivered. It is evidenced by a register, not by a rota or a contract. If the register is a paper book in a cupboard and the claim is a figure in a spreadsheet, the two have no connection and reconciling them a year later means an afternoon with both.

The headcount return you submitted. Keep the submission itself, with its date and its figures, not just the payment that followed. Reconciling a payment you disagree with requires knowing what you claimed, and "what we claimed" is surprisingly hard to recover once the term has closed.

Hours claimed against hours delivered

The check most worth running each term is the simplest one, and few settings do it routinely: for every funded child, put the hours you claimed next to the hours the register shows you delivered.

They will not match exactly, and they are not supposed to, because a child who is absent for a fortnight of a funded term does not reduce the claim. What you are looking for is the child whose claim assumes sessions that were never on the timetable, the child who left in week four, and the child whose pattern changed in October and whose claim did not.

Doing this termly turns an awkward conversation with your local authority into a note you made at the time. Doing it once a year, when somebody asks, turns it into a reconstruction.

Charging around the funded hours

The funded hours themselves have to be free to the parent. You cannot charge for them, and you cannot require a top-up payment as the price of taking a funded place.

You may charge for consumables such as meals, nappies and sun cream, and for additional services such as trips or extra sessions. The constraint is that these must not be a condition of the funded place: a parent has to have a route to the funded hours that does not require them to buy the extras, for example by supplying a packed lunch themselves.

Two practical consequences. Say what the charges are in writing, with amounts, before a place starts, because a charge disclosed in month three reads as a condition even when it is not. And itemise them on the invoice rather than folding them into a single figure, so that what is funded and what is chargeable are visibly different things.

Check your local authority's provider agreement for the detail. The entitlements are national; the claim process, the headcount dates and the local rules around charging are administered locally and do vary.

Where this usually goes wrong

Not in the claim. In the joins.

The register lives in one place, the codes live in a folder, the invoice is produced in a third system, and each of them is individually fine. The failure is that a change in one does not reach the others: a child moves from two days to three in September and the funded split on the invoice stays as it was, quietly, for a term.

The only durable fix is for the funded hours on the invoice to be derived from the same attendance record the claim is derived from. If they are typed separately, they will drift, and the drift will be discovered by a parent.

Little Bees works out funded hours from the same attendance record that produces the register, shows them as their own line on the parent's invoice, and keeps the eligibility code with the dates it was validated and reconfirmed.