Staff Discount Explainer

Recently, the government announced that you can now provide centre staff with a discount when their children attend the centre but still report the full fee to CCS for the purposes of calculating their CCS entitlements.

In order to accommodate this new provision, OWNA has added the ability to set up fee structures in each room (Centre > Manage Rooms).

The fee structure can be given a name, session of care, rate (the full dollar amount you are submitting to CCS) and a Discounted rate (the dollar amount you are charging the family after the discount has been subtracted).

Providers can offer discounts to employees who:

• are employed, contracted or engaged as an educator or early childhood teacher, and
• are working at a Centre Based Day Care or Outside School Hours Care (OSHC) service, and
• have a child enrolled in an early childhood education and care service where they work or is owned by their provider.

Note: A centre director or OSHC coordinator who has an early childhood education and care qualification and is working at a service would be considered an educator or early childhood teacher and is eligible for a discount.

It’s up to a provider how much they want to discount. The employee must still pay at least 5% of the gap fee.

The way fees are normally applied is that you charge a ‘full fee’ (e.g. $110 per session) and CCS will usually chip in a percentage of this fee to offset costs that the parents have to pay (e.g. $78.38). Then the family pays what is known as the ‘gap’ ($31.62).

This is how it looks in the Family Transactions:

Now that we are applying a discounted fee, the system will add a credit for the difference between the ‘full fee’ rate and the discounted rate. So if we wanted to apply a 20% discount (Discounted Rate = $88), then the difference of $22 is applied as a discount.

The parent then pays the gap after the CCS and discount are applied:

Now that you can charge a lower rate for the session while still submitting the full fee, it's important to make sure your discounted fee isn’t less than the CCS being paid or else it will put the staff account into ever-increasing credit.

E.g. if I work out a 35% discount on my full fee, my discounted rate will be $71.50 (discount of $38.50).

In this example, the staff/parent pays nothing, while getting a weekly credit on their account of $6.88:

Click here to learn about the new Staff Discount Setup!

• DESE Guidelines for child care discount

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