Setting Your Local Council Funding Grant Rates
To make sure Famly can calculate the correct Local Council funding for each child, you’ll first need to enter your council’s grant rates. If you haven’t added these yet, you can follow the steps below to get started.
If you already know your funding rate will be changing, you can also set up a new rate period in advance.
Stretching Funding
If children attend all year round, you can spread (or stretch) their funding across the whole year. This is common for nurseries that annualise their fees. Instead of deducting a higher amount just during term-time weeks, Famly will spread the total funding evenly across every week the child attends.
In each child’s plan, you can enter the number of funded hours they receive per week. If this works out as a decimal, simply select add as decimal.
Example:
A child receives 30 hours of funding for 38 weeks but attends 51 weeks.
30 hours × 38 weeks = 1140 hours for the year
1140 ÷ 51 weeks = 22.35 hours per week
Famly will then apply 22.35 funded hours across the child’s sessions each week. This is how the total funding amount is calculated.
💡 You can also set the funding manually, but we don’t recommend this as it increases the risk of over or under-funding.
Funding Specific Hours
Some nurseries choose to allow funding only for certain hours or sessions. To do this in Famly, you’ll need to create two types of hourly sessions:
Funded hourly session – for the hours covered by the council grant
Non-funded hourly session – for additional chargeable hours at your standard rate
For example, a child could receive:
15 funded hours (entered as a Funded hours session) at the council rate
12 additional hours (entered as an Additional hours session) at your nursery rate
Once you’ve set up both types of sessions, you can add them to a child’s plan.
When a Plan Changes Mid-week
Funding in Famly is always based on a full Monday–Friday week. If a child’s plan changes mid-week, or if your invoice period splits a week, Famly will automatically redistribute the funding. You can always see exactly how this is applied by checking the invoice preview.
Famly will never apply more than one week’s worth of funding in a single week.
Example:
A child has two morning sessions and three afternoon sessions each week
The mornings use 10 funded hours, and Monday afternoon uses 4 more
This leaves 1 hour, which Famly applies to the next eligible afternoon session
If the week is split across two invoice periods, the hours will be allocated accordingly (e.g. 14 hours on one invoice, 1 hour on the next).
💡 If a child’s booking plan is split into parts, funding can only ever be applied to the first part of that plan
Funding on Bank Holidays
If a funded session falls on a bank holiday, Famly will move that funding to the next available day. This ensures the child still receives their full entitlement.
If you’d prefer not to reallocate funding like this, you’ll need to adjust the child’s plan:
Go to the child’s profile
Click Bookings and open the relevant plan
Select Edit and open the session that should not receive funding
Click Disallow funding
Save and exit
If you also want to prevent a session from being fully funded when it’s already partly funded, you can set it up as an hourly rate instead. Then, allow funding on the hours you want and disallow it for the rest.