Nursery invoicing software that’s top of the class

Manually working out funding is a nightmare.

Whether your Local Authority (LA) is clear as ice or obscure as fog, having to work out which children should have what deducted from their hours (or never charged in the first place) each month is time-consuming and a drain.

So get yourself software that does it for you – jump to the second section to find out more and skip the likely all-too-familiar manual funding scenario.

Setting the manual funding scene

Let’s set up a hypothetical scenario that hopefully isn’t too far away from your own funding experiences. Previously you charged £70 for a 10-hour day, with a consumables fee on top for all those sundries kids may or may not need over the course of the day let’s call that £5.

A child in Monday-Wednesday a week in January 2025 (5 Wednesdays, 4 Monday and Tuesdays) would have parents charged £975, with maths that might have looked kind of like this:

But now, consumables have to be separated and optional. Some of your children have now been opted out of paying for meals because they bring in lunchboxes. So instantly you have added complexity – making sure to log the meals provided by you versus the ones brought in from home, as a per-child thing and not an overall count.

Then, we have funding.

Are you term time, or are you stretching your funding? Does your LA permit stretching, or alternatively force it? Do they force it just for the weeks you’re open, or do you have to cover 52 when you’re only open 50? And is that funding close, or miles away, from what you’d normally expect for those hours?

Now, wrap that all up and work it out for each child, every month.

And make sure the parent at no point thinks could have been charged but had the hours ‘discounted’ or ‘refunded’. While ensuring you’re not claiming more funding from your LA than the parent is due.

Suddenly it’s no longer £70 plus for a child who was in all day, 3 days a week for a month. You’ve got to sum up:

• the first fully funded day,
• the second fully funded day,
• and the third day part-funded (2 hours funded, 8 not),
  • charging an hourly rate and not ‘a day rate divided by ten and multiplied’,
• plus consumables that were consumed, separated out as line items.

For ‘simplicity’ we’ll assume the child only ate or used the things they’re opted into and you didn’t have to provide a meal on a day they forgot their lunchbox. And they don’t use nappies.

This child has stretched funding over 52 weeks, meaning it’s not 30 hours a week but 22 (rounded up).

Now the maths for January 2025 might be:

But of course your LA probably wants to see how that’s spread across the month, so your invoice has to be a line-by-line breakdown of each day. Maybe like this:

There must be a better way, right?

Let Ovivio’s funding automation save the day

From all that complexity, let’s make it simple. Our financing software:

• Removes ambiguity – tell it what you want to charge for different scenarios and the system will work it out for your invoices. Your invoices will be consistent
• Improves clarity – invoices will show exactly when it was free versus when it was charged
• Tailored to match all possible LA requirements
• Clean breakdown without pages and pages of sessions
• Automated to remove monthly calculation requirements
• More options for deducting funding in different ways than anywhere else

Ovivio invoices can be a whole month:

Or week by week, popular with those parents on Universal Credit:

It’s clear to the parent, easy to set up, and you can automate without loads of session types. All of that stuff in the previous section? Not an issue.

Imagine – hours of work, every month, reduced to minutes. Why wouldn’t you want that in your nursery?