Upcoming changes in response to DFE charging guidance

Upcoming changes in response to DFE charging guidance

As of 21 February 2025, the Department of Education's Statutory guidance for local authorities on the provision of early education and childcare has been updated to include the provision that:

Info
A1.36 Invoices and receipts should be itemised, and local authorities should work with providers to ensure their invoices break down separately into
  1. the free entitlement hours
  2. additional private paid hours
  3. food charges
  4. non-food consumables charges
  5. activities charges
Local authorities should ensure these itemised invoices are in place by January 2026.

Fortunately, our nursery management system, eymanage, is already well-positioned to help you be compliant with these guidelines. Take a look at these features available on the system right now:
  1. Invoicing:
    1. On invoices, sessions charges are broken down into Funded and Chargeable Hours.
    2. On invoices, different sessions are shown on separate lines. Sessions can be marked as Extra either when creating a session type or when scheduling a session for a child, which means that it is non-funded and is charged as such.
  2. Products/Services:
    1. Consumables, food, and activities must be added as products/services before they can be added to invoices, at which point each product/service is displayed on a separate line. 
    2. Products/services can either be added manually to invoices, or allocated automatically. If a child has opted out of food, consumable, or activity charges, they can be excluded during product/service allocation.

However, in order to make these features more intuitive, and to give customers more options when customising their charging details, we plan to implement additional improvements to our invoicing and products/services by the end of the year. Keep an eye out for these upcoming releases:

eymanage
  1. Create Session Type: Multiple Rates > As per Times/Day now applies funding to these rates by default. Each time period can be assigned a funding priority (with lower numbers having funding assigned first), or can be individually excluded from funding/discounts - Update live as of 04/08/2025
  2. Create Product/Service: 
    1. The Apply Discount option will be displayed without having to check Automatically allocate products/services.
    2. Allocation Rules will no longer be split between Children and Rooms/Tags/Cohorts/Funding Types. Instead, both options will be combined to make it easier to filter allocation subjects.
    3. There will be the option to apply different Flat Rates to different age groups.
    4. Automated Rates As Per Formula will include an additional function to allow for different rates per age group.
eylog
  1. Daily Diary: In the What I Ate Today section, practitioners will have the option to indicate that a child has brought their Own Meal from home instead of using the food menu for the day.

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