UK Childminder FAQs & Help Centre

When generating invoices in advance before a new term officially begins (such as creating September invoices during August), no daily register or attendance entries have been logged for that term yet. KinderStart projects your full funded entitlement directly from the child's active contract (e.g. 195.0h for a 15h/week 13-week term), showing 0.0h used and the full allocation remaining on invoice previews and parent PDFs.

Yes. Statutory funding rules state that funded hours must be completely free of charge at the point of delivery, but providers are permitted to make reasonable, voluntary charges for meals, snacks, nappies, wipes, and specialised outings. KinderStart invoices itemise 0p funded hours alongside transparent consumable fees.

Stretched funding spreads a child's annual funded entitlement (e.g. 570 hours for 15 hours/week, or 1,140 hours for 30 hours/week) across 48 to 52 operating weeks rather than 38 term-time weeks. KinderStart's funding engine automatically equalises weekly caps, prevents entitlement over-claims, and itemises consumable fees cleanly.

Yes. Set a child's entitlement on their contract and the funding tracker shows the hours used and remaining each term. Funded hours are matched to the register and appear on the invoice at £0.

Yes. Record the share of the entitlement that comes to you, as hours or a percentage, on the child's contract. KinderStart then never claims more than your share.

Hours lost to illness or closures go into a banked-hours pot. You can offer them back to the parent to use on an extra day.

Yes. Set a funded-hours window, for example 9am to 3pm, on the contract or as a default for your setting. Only sessions inside the window use the child's funded hours.

Nothing to set up. Days before the funding start date are billed at your private rate, and funded hours begin from the date you enter.

Yes. Each month KinderStart builds every invoice from the contract, the register and any extras you have logged. Funded hours show at £0 alongside private hours and consumables. You check each invoice before it goes to the parent.

Parents pay by bank transfer, Tax-Free Childcare or a payment link you add to the invoice. Payments are not taken inside the app. You record a payment in one tap, overdue invoices are flagged, and you can send the parent a reminder with one tap.

Yes. Each contract is billed hourly, daily or by session (before school, after school or holiday). Different children can be on different rates.

Yes, as long as it has not been paid. Unpaid invoices can be edited, cancelled or deleted. Once an invoice is paid it is corrected with a credit note, so your records stay complete for HMRC.

Yes. Choose exact minutes, round up to the nearest 30 minutes, or round up to the hour. Set it once for your setting or override it on a single contract. Funded hours are never rounded up.

Yes. A deposit is taken off the first invoice automatically. If you close after an invoice has already gone out, issue a credit note or adjust the days on the reconciliation calendar.

Parents pay from their government Tax-Free Childcare account, where the government adds £2 for every £8 they put in, up to £2,000 a year per child. Payments are not taken inside KinderStart. When you send an invoice, the parent sees your bank details and a payment reference, pays from their Tax-Free Childcare account, and you record the payment in one tap.

Yes. Childminders can invite multiple parents, guardians, and carers to a child's profile. Each parent receives a secure invite link to log into the iOS/Android parent app or web portal to view daily diaries, photos, invoices, and developmental snapshots.

From April 2026, self-employed childminders with gross self-employment and property income over £50,000 must keep digital records and submit quarterly summaries to HMRC using MTD-compatible software. The threshold lowers to £30,000 in April 2027. KinderStart is built from the ground up for HMRC MTD compliance with direct digital record keeping.

Childminders can claim food and drink costs for minded children, craft supplies, safety equipment, training, and professional subscriptions (such as PACEY, SCMA, or Early Years Alliance). You can also use HMRC's special childminder agreed rules to claim a percentage of your household bills (heating, water, council tax) and 10% wear and tear on household furnishings.

In England, a registered childminder can care for up to 6 children under the age of 8, with a maximum of 3 young children (under 5), and normally only 1 under the age of 1. Exceptions to care for twins, siblings, or to maintain continuity of care for existing children are permitted if you demonstrate risk assessment compliance and space standards.

The statutory 2-Year Progress Check must be completed when a child is between the ages of 24 and 36 months. It must review the child's development in the three prime areas of learning: Communication & Language, Physical Development, and Personal, Social & Emotional Development (PSED), highlighting strengths and any areas where additional support is needed.

Under UK early years and insurance regulations, accident logs, medication consent forms, and physical injury body maps must be retained until the child reaches age 21 years and 3 months (or age 24 in special cases). KinderStart securely archives these records in encrypted cloud storage with automatic retention tracking.

Yes. Start from templates or upload your own. Mark a policy as needing a signature and every current and future parent is asked to sign it. A reminder button covers anyone who has not.

Yes. An inspector evidence pack pulls your records together in one place, and a mock inspection walks you through the questions you are likely to be asked. Settings in Scotland get Care Inspectorate self-evaluation.

Yes. Add or remove consents in Settings and they appear on every new contract. If you replace the built-in photo consent with your own, the photo check switches off rather than warning you about every child.

Yes. KinderStart is hosted on Amazon Web Services in London and covered by UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. Everything is encrypted in transit and at rest, and photos are never public: each one is served through a private link that only your account and the invited parents can open. Parents only ever see their own child. Photo consent is recorded per child, so a family who says no is left out of shared photos. We never sell data or use it for advertising, and nothing entered into the app is used to train AI models. You can switch on two-step sign-in, and you stay the data controller, so you decide how long records are kept and can export or delete them. Share our Privacy Policy and Security page with parents at kinderstart.co.uk/legal/privacy-policy and kinderstart.co.uk/legal/security-compliance.

Yes. Every child has a Private Log for notes and documents that only your setting can see. Safeguarding concerns are recorded separately with their own status.

Yes. Add first aid, DBS, insurance and any other certificate with its expiry date, and you are notified before it runs out.

Your choice. Switch on live mode and each update is shared as you log it. Leave it off and nothing is visible until you publish the day. Parents get a notification when you publish.

Yes. Parents can comment on diary entries and observations, and the comment shows their name. You can message a parent one to one, or post to every family at once on the Noticeboard.

Yes. Medication is logged with the reason and a parent counter-signature. Accidents and incidents are signed digitally. Sleep checks can be logged for every napping child in one go.

From the home screen, with one tap per child. You can record who dropped off and who collected. Children who come before and after school get two sessions in the same day.

Yes. Thirty minutes after their contracted start time you are asked to confirm they have arrived or to record why not. A genuinely late arrival is logged as a safeguarding check.

Yes. Absences take a reason and a note. Extra days are booked as ad hoc sessions. The attendance history shows arrival and departure times for any past date.

You build a contract from your own template in the app and send it to the parent. They sign it digitally in their KinderStart app. You keep the signed PDF and a full history of every version.

Yes. Clauses for deposits, payment terms, notice periods, closures, fees and late charges are all yours to write. Save them in a template so every new contract starts the same way.

Yes. Choose a schedule type for each contract: fixed, term-time (38 or 40 weeks), stretched across the year, wrap-around or ad hoc. The term dates you set in Settings decide what counts as a school week.

Yes. Add the child, enter the existing agreement as a contract and mark it as already signed. This is done one child at a time. There is no bulk import from another app yet.

Yes. Write the group observation once, then split it into a separate draft for each child. Edit each one and publish them separately.

Yes. Next steps written inside an observation or on their own all appear in one Next Steps tab. You can plan an activity straight from an observation and link the children to it.

Yes. The 2-year progress check, progress reports with a parent summary, an EYFS end-of-year report and a health visitor report are all built in.

Yes. Each assistant logs in separately. You choose what they can do, such as signing children in and out, giving medication, creating accident forms, publishing the diary or holding sole charge. Their hours are tracked on a timesheet.

No. Each KinderStart account has its own email address. If your child's childminder has invited you as a parent, use a different email address for your own childminder account.

Not yet. Today you log expenses, income and mileage in the app with photo receipts, and they feed straight into your HMRC updates and tax estimate. A bank feed that matches transactions for you is on our roadmap.

Not yet. Children and existing contracts are added by hand, which most childminders finish in an afternoon. Everything can be exported if you ever leave. A guided import is on our roadmap.

Recurring extras such as meals are billed daily, weekly or monthly on the contract. Charging them only on the days the child actually attends is on our roadmap.

Today you can add it to your morning checklist and note the reading. A proper temperature log with safe-range warnings, built for Scottish settings, is on our roadmap.

Each childminder keeps their own record for the child, with the other setting and the funding split noted on the profile. Co-childminders working from one setting share one account. A single record linked across two settings is on our roadmap.

You can see whether their invite has been accepted, and you will see their comments and signatures. A last-active indicator for each parent is on our roadmap.

Upload it as a shared document today and every family sees it in their documents. A dedicated welcome pack that new families see the first time they log in is on our roadmap.

Allergies, conditions and dietary needs live on the child's profile, and personal plans and SEND plans are built in. A healthcare plan document that parents sign is on our roadmap.