🔒 Automatic funding entitlements is currently in beta, you can toggle it on in your Playground. We recommend testing it on a few different funding cases before rolling it out fully. You can turn it off and revert to plan-based funding at any time, but this will apply to all children

What are Automatic Funding Entitlements?

With automatic funding entitlements, you set up your entitlement rates once at site-level, and assign the right entitlement to each child. Famly then automatically calculates how many funded hours that child is entitled to and updates the rate as the child ages up.

Why Use Automatic Funding Entitlements?

Less manual admin: no more updating every child's plan individually when entitlements change. Simply set the entitlements at site-level and apply them to each child; after that, the rates will be updated automatically
Better visibility into future revenue: because Famly knows in advance when a child will move into a new funding rate, we can predict the funding you will receive over the coming months
Easier plan creation: no need to manually enter funded hours, maximum hours, or adjust deductions. Funding is applied based on the entitlement chosen
Consistency at scale: whether you have 10 children or 1,000 across multiple sites, the same entitlement rules are applied every time, reducing the risk of manual errors

To see automatic funding entitlements in action, check out our video guide here:

How to Set Up Automatic Funding Entitlements

Step 1: Add the rates

We've pre-populated the available entitlements and their funded hours. All you need to do is add a start date and your local authority's rates to each entitlement. Once that's done, you're ready to apply entitlements to children.

Step 2: Apply an entitlement to a child

Instead of typing funded hours into a child's plan, assign them the relevant entitlement from their child profile under the Bookings tab in the Funding section or from the plan. From there, Famly will:

Calculate the child's funded hours based on the entitlement and their attendance schedule and add it to the plan
Automatically apply the correct entitlement rate as the child ages up
Show funding on invoices the same way it does today, as funded hours deducted from the parent's invoice
Display the entitlement on the child's profile, where you can also view and add eligibility codes

Step 3: Manage entitlements over time

Once an entitlement is set up, you can schedule a change to the hourly rate to kick in from a future date. Reports will then project children's funding using the rate that applies at any given time, making it much easier to plan ahead.

Step 4: Update a child's funding

You can update a child's funding straight away, or plan for a change, for example from the start of the next term.

For children on Working Parents funding, Famly will automatically move them to the next age bracket when they age up at the next term start. For example, a child on Working Parents (under 2) will move to Working Parents (2 years old) at the next term start. Term dates are built into the system, and changes take effect on:

1 January
1 April
1 September

If a child needs to change entitlement, for example from Working Parents to Universal, you can make that change manually and choose when it takes effect.

How Funding is Applied to Plans

Each entitlement carries either 30 or 15 funded hours per week, over 38 weeks (1,140 or 570 hours in total). When applied to a child, Famly aligns those hours with the number of weeks in their attendance schedule where funding can be allocated.

Term time only

If a child is on a term-time-only attendance schedule (38 weeks) with Working Parents funding, they'll receive 30 hours per week on their plan.

Stretched funding

If funding is stretched over more weeks, Famly takes the total hours and divides them across the number of fundable weeks in the attendance schedule.

Example: Working Parents funding (30 hours/week) stretched over 51 weeks. Total hours = 30 x 38 = 1,140. Divided by 51 weeks = 22.35 hours per week.

With automatic funding entitlements, if your attendance schedule runs across the full year, your weekly funded hours will automatically be stretched evenly across all attending weeks, rather than only across term time.

💡 A full year is not exactly 52 weeks, but would be 52 weeks 1 day for this school year (from September 2026/2027), but depending on the school year it might be different. For example, for September 2027/2028 it's 52 weeks 2 days. This means the weekly number you see may look different to what you're used to. A standard 30-hour entitlement (1,140 hours per year) works out to 21.84 hours per week when spread across 52.2 weeks, and a 15-hour entitlement works out to 10.92 hours per week

If your setting has any closure days, these are taken into account and reduce the number of attending weeks used in this calculation, so your weekly stretched amount may differ slightly depending on your specific closure days.

You can see the total number of attending weeks used for this calculation in the bottom-left corner of your attendance schedule:

If a child splits their funded hours across more than one nursery, you can reduce the number of hours applied in Famly when setting up funding on their profile. You can't enter more than 30 hours in total.

Non-fundable days

If you're using an actuals billing scheme, you can mark specific dates as non-fundable in the attendance schedule. This limits the number of weeks the funding is divided over.

💡 The maximum you can receive is 30 funded hours per week

Reporting Updates

Revenue report

Nothing changes visually, but the forecasting will now factor in rate changes as children age up, making projections more accurate.

Public funding report

The Public Funding report is now split into two tabs: Automatic funding and Manual funding. Both tabs show all children, but each one displays data from a different funding method.

Automatic funding shows data from the new entitlement-based funding setup. It's a handy way to spot any children who haven't been moved over to the new funding method yet, and you can quickly edit details like eligibility code, contact, and NI number directly from the report
Manual funding shows data from the old funding method

💡 The funding loop export lives in the Automatic funding tab and covers all children, regardless of which funding method they're on

Migrating to Automatic Funding Entitlements

Automatic funding entitlements is currently only available on the new invoicing experience, so make sure any new plans are also set up with the improved billing schemes.

Switching a child over replaces the manual funding entry on their plan going forward, so you won't need to keep both in sync. Children who haven't been moved across will continue using the funding set up in their plan until you assign them an entitlement.

If automatic funding entitlements isn't working for your needs, you can turn it off at any time in your Playground. If you do, all children will revert to the old funding setup they had before.

📣 We'd love to hear how it's working for you! You can share feedback directly from the funding area on the child bookings page