Childminder MTD Records: Attendance Register, Cashbook and Food Receipts

Childminder MTD Records: Attendance Register, Cashbook and Food Receipts

Your attendance register and cashbook are not going anywhere — Ofsted still expects the register, and a cashbook is still a perfectly sensible way to see your business at a glance. The question under Making Tax Digital isn't whether to keep them. It's whether they're doing the specific job MTD needs: a digital, dated record that ties income and expenses to evidence, updated as you go rather than reconstructed in January.

[!IMPORTANT] This post is part of our 2026 MTD Roadmap for Childminders. If you haven't confirmed which threshold and start date apply to you, read that first.

The gap a register alone leaves

An attendance register answers "who was here, and when." It doesn't answer "how much were they charged, how was it paid, and what's the evidence for the expense that went with it." Those are three separate facts, and MTD's quarterly updates need all three linked, not just the first one.

This isn't childminders finding a workaround for a new rule — it's the end of a long-standing one. For years, HMRC (then Inland Revenue) and the National Childminding Association, now Coram PACEY, operated an agreement letting childminders rely on a paper cash book and attendance register as their financial record. HMRC's Business Income Manual (BIM52751) is explicit that this arrangement doesn't carry over once you're within MTD: standard digital record-keeping rules apply, the same as for any other self-employed business.

The same gap shows up with a cashbook. A single running total of "childminding income" for the month tells you very little when a payment needs unpicking later — was that £640 a full month's fee, a part-payment, or a fee plus a top-up session? Without the underlying detail, you're reconstructing the story from memory at exactly the point you have the least time to do it.

The weekly three-way match

The most sustainable fix isn't a new system — it's a habit, done weekly rather than saved for the return. For each child, each week, keep three facts visibly linked:

1. Attendance — the sessions actually delivered, from your existing register.
2. Amount due — the fee for that attendance, matched to your contracted rate or invoice, recorded as its own line rather than folded into a running total.
3. Amount and route received — bank transfer, Tax-Free Childcare, cash, or a mix, recorded against the specific week it settles, not just "received in March."

When those three sit side by side, a quarterly update becomes an export, not a reconstruction. Worth knowing: what HMRC actually receives each quarter is a summary — category totals for income and expenses, not individual transactions or receipts. What the weekly habit is really for is the record behind that summary, which you're still required to keep digitally and produce on request. When the detail isn't there, every unusual payment — a late payer, a part-refund, a top-up session — becomes a small investigation months after the fact instead of a one-line note made at the time.

[!TIP] If Tax-Free Childcare or funded-hours payments are part of your income mix, the reconciliation gets a layer more specific — see our dedicated guide on Tax-Free Childcare payments and MTD records and on deposits, retainers and funded hours.

The 'digital link' rule — no manual retyping

MTD's digital record-keeping isn't only about the format of the record — it's about how the data is allowed to move once it's in a system. HMRC's rule is that once a transaction is entered digitally, any transfer of that figure into another system, or into your submission, has to happen through a digital link — a formula, an export/import, an automated API transfer. Manually retyping or copy-pasting a figure between spreadsheets, or between a spreadsheet and your submission software, breaks that link and can be treated as a breach of the MTD rules.

In practice, this rules out a setup a lot of childminders use without realising it's a problem: a paper note or a standalone spreadsheet, manually typed into HMRC's system at the end of the quarter. The fix isn't more discipline with the same tools — it's a system where the record you keep day-to-day is the record that reaches HMRC, with no manual retyping step in between.

Food, snacks and a mixed household shop

Food is the expense category that trips up the most childminders, because the receipt rarely matches the business cost. A weekly supermarket shop covers the children you mind and your own family, on one till receipt, at one till.

This is one area where the rules genuinely differ depending on whether MTD applies to you yet. Before your MTD start date, HMRC has long accepted a simplified weekly or monthly estimate for children's food and drink — no supermarket receipts required, provided the figure is reasonable and applied consistently. That simplification does not carry over once MTD applies. From your MTD start date, food and drink is treated like any other shared cost: you can only claim the portion incurred wholly and exclusively for the children you mind, apportioned from the actual receipt on a just, reasonable and consistent basis — not a flat weekly guess.

Two things make that apportionment workable rather than a guessing game:

• Keep the full receipt digitally, exactly as it was issued — don't pre-edit it down to a business-only figure before it's stored.
• Add a short, contemporaneous note against it at the time, not months later: what was bought for the children you mind, and on what basis you've split the cost. "Three lunches, two snacks, minded children" written the day you shop is a record; a percentage invented at year end is a reconstruction, and MTD does not accept reconstructions in place of records kept as you go.

Don't lump food in with your other frequent categories. Toys, craft materials, outings and household wear-and-tear each have a different evidence pattern — a receipt with a business-use apportionment is a different record from a food shop with a per-child note. Mixing them into one "miscellaneous expenses" bucket is exactly what makes a record hard to defend later. For the household-cost side specifically, see our guides on the use-of-home calculation and the wear-and-tear allowance changes.

Examples that show why the register alone isn't enough

A cash payment, no bank trail. A parent hands over £200 in cash for two weeks' care. The register shows the attendance; nothing shows the payment unless you write it down that day, against that child, for that period. A month later, £200 in a cash tin tells you nothing about which family or which weeks it covers.

A part-payment and a top-up session in the same week. A parent pays their usual £450 fee, plus £30 for an extra Friday session booked at short notice. If both land as one £480 bank transfer with no note, you'll spend real time next quarter working out whether that £30 was a one-off or a rate change.

Food bought two days before it's used. A big shop on Sunday covers meals for the whole of the following week. The note explaining the split needs to be made close to the shop, while you can still remember what was for the children and what wasn't — not reconstructed from a bank statement three months later.

Before your next quarterly update

• Confirm every payment this quarter is linked to a specific child, period and route — not sitting as an unexplained bank line.
• Check food and household receipts have a note against them from the week they were incurred, not a retrospective estimate.
• Separate any one-off, unusual payment (a late fee, a part-refund, a top-up session) onto its own line rather than folding it into the regular fee total.