Apply public funding to a child's plan

How to set up and apply public funding to sessions at your setting

Julia Rose avatar
Written by Julia Rose
Updated over a week ago

Set your Local Council Funding Grant rates

In order for Famly to calculate what you can expect from the Local Council in funding for each child you'll need to enter your local council grant rates.


If you know that the rate will be changing, you can simply add a new rate period.


Adding funding to a child's plan

Go to the Bookings tab in the child's profile to see their current plans.

  • Click on the child's plan

  • Add the hours/ sessions the child will attend

  • Under Summary click Add Public Funding on the right-hand side.

  • A new window will open (as below) where you can view and edit funding information for this child

Set Automatically

Simply by entering the number of funded hours per week, Famly will automatically enter the amount in the Deduction from invoice box.

In the above example, to give this child 15 hours for free it will cost the nursery £82.20, based on their their hourly rate.

The number of hours you enter will depend on the number of hours your local authority mandates, and whether you're choosing to stretch their funding throughout the year.

Set Maximum Daily Funded Hours

Setting the maximum funded hours per day will ensure the hours are automatically distributed accordingly across the week. Combining this setting with allowing or disallowing funding on specific sessions by clicking on them in the plan builder will help you with the setup of very specific funding patterns.

You can set a default maximum of funded hours per day by going to your Settings → Finances → Public funding

Set Manually

Famly also allows you to override and set the rate or the monetary amount of funding you want to deduct from the invoice yourself. However, doing this will leave you in total control of the funding and require you to update the funding every time you change the plan or the child moves to the next pricing group.

If you choose to set funding manually, you must also update it manually.

To set your funding manually, check the Set manually box as shown below


Partially funded sessions

For sessions that are partially funded it is best to separate these into two segments, one funded and one non-funded. This is because if a session time is not fully funded it will calculate the funding per minute and due to rounding will result in your figures being off by a few pence.

To eliminate this issue, partially funded sessions should be entered as below. Say a child is attending a Full Day session, but funding should only be allocated between 6 am and 12 pm. Add two Full Day sessions with times to reflect the funded hours, then remove funding from one of the sessions:

You'll be left with a Full Day session, with funding applied to one half only:

To do this you will need a session available that can be booked by hourly and flexibly. See below which boxes need to be ticked to enable this. You can use your usual hourly pricing, or the hourly version of your day session to create this.

Now when you click on the session you will have the option to add two sets of start and end times, for example:

Save and your total will now be correct.


Amending the distribution of funding

If funding has been added, Famly highlights the hours that will be funded in a normal full week, by striping the session (as shown below).

If you wish to change the way that Famly has distributed the funding, you are able to change it by clicking the session and selecting 'Disallow Funding'. Now, Famly will apply the funding to other sessions in the child's plan. A session that is marked with an 'F' is one that you have decided can have funding applied to it.

You will receive a warning if there are not enough hours marked with an F to fulfil the number of hours you've added in funding. You will also receive a warning if the amount of funding (in £) is not large enough to cover the number of hours you've entered.

The invoice will state the number of hours you've entered, not the amount in £.


Viewing the invoice summary

To view the invoicing summary:

  • Go to the child's profile

  • Go to the Bookings tab in the child's profile to see their current plans

  • Click on their plan to open it

  • Find the Public funding section and click to open the summary

This will provide you with the funding details, as you've entered them - the number of hours and the funding amount that will be deducted from the invoice.

You can click on the arrow next to the session names in order to get a detailed breakdown.

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