Finance Reports

Finance reporting answers one question: where does your income actually come from? The Finance page splits what you’ve already invoiced into what families paid and what the council owes you, then forecasts the month ahead from the sessions already booked. Both charts can be narrowed to a single room.

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Filtering by room

The Room selector sits in the page header, beside the heading, and scopes both charts at once. Leave it on All Rooms for a whole-site view, or pick a room to see what that room invoices and is expected to earn. Each chart keeps its own dates: the invoiced chart has a term selector, and the projection has a month stepper.

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Invoiced income

This is money you have already billed, broken down by month across the selected term. Four figures sit above the chart:

• From families — what you billed parents for sessions and extras, with its share of total income.
• From council — what the council owes you for funded hours, with its share.
• Paid — how much of the total has been settled.
• Outstanding — how much is still unpaid, shown in red.

The bars are stacked, so the height of each bar is the total income earned that month — families plus council. Hover any bar for the exact figures.

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How council income is worked out

This is the part most nurseries can’t easily see anywhere else. Council income is not an estimate or a national average — it’s calculated from your own council rates:

1. Every invoiced session line carries the number of funded hours it used.
2. Each child is placed in an age band — under two, two-year-old, or over two — based on their age at the start of the funding year (1 September), which is how councils fund a child for a whole year.
3. Those hours are multiplied by your hourly rate for that band and funding year.

The funding year runs September to August, and rates are applied from the period the care was billed for, so care invoiced a month ahead is still valued at the right term’s rate. If From council reads £0.00 and no warning appears, the invoices in that term simply carried no funded hours.

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Projected income

The projection looks forward instead of back: what the sessions already in the diary are expected to earn. It breaks the month into four income streams, each with its own colour on the chart:

• Session fees — what families pay for booked sessions.
• Council funding — the value of funded hours in those sessions.
• Top-up — what families pay above their funded entitlement.
• Extras — extra charges such as meals, nappies or clubs.

Alongside the total you also get an average per working day, which is the quickest way to sanity-check a month against the one before it. Use the arrows beside the month name to step forward. A few deliberate limits keep the forecast honest:

• It only goes forwards. Once a month has been invoiced, the invoiced chart above is the accurate record, so the projection never contradicts it by looking back.
• It stops three months out. Sessions beyond that are too provisional to be worth forecasting.
• The current month starts from today. Income already earned this month is on the invoiced chart, so counting it again would double it up.
• Weekends are left out rather than plotted as zero, which would draw cliffs that read as a collapse in income.

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Funding distribution

If your setting uses funding forms, a separate Funding report shows the estimated value of government funding for a term, based on your approved funding forms. The report shows a doughnut chart of the split across the three age bands, with the total in the centre, and an Estimated Breakdown beside it giving the hours, the hourly rate and the total for each band:

• Under Two
• Two Year Olds
• Over Two

Use the term selector to change term.

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What’s included

Totals come from approved funding forms only. Two notes can appear next to the heading:

• A help icon telling you how many approved forms the figure is based on.
• An amber warning telling you how many unapproved forms were excluded. Approve them to bring them into the totals.

Other messages you may see:

• “No funding forms are available for this term” — no forms cover the selected term.
• “Funding rates for this year have not been set” — add the year’s rates under Settings → Funding.

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Exporting the detail

To reconcile these charts against a spreadsheet, use Export on the Invoices page. It produces one row per invoiced session line, including the council-income working, so you can slice income by child, room and age band yourself.

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Frequently Asked Questions

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Why is council income showing as zero?

Either the invoices carried no funded hours, or you haven’t set council rates. If rates are missing for a year that has funded hours, a note appears above the chart — add them under Settings → Funding.

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Do I need funding forms for council income to appear?

No. Council rates are always used to value funded hours on the Finance page. Funding forms only drive the separate Funding report.

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Why can’t I project further than three months ahead?

Sessions that far out are still provisional, and term-time-only children are skipped outside a defined term — so a longer view would report a gap in your data as though it were a fall in income.

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Why don’t the two charts cover the same dates?

They answer different questions. The invoiced chart reports a whole term that has already been billed; the projection forecasts a single month that hasn’t. Only the room filter applies to both.

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Who can see these reports?

Admins and Owners. The Funding report additionally requires funding forms to be switched on for your setting.