May 2nd, 2024
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As the transition date of 10 July 2023 is fast approaching for the new Child Care Subsidy (CCS) changes, it's important that you understand the detail of these changes, how they will impact the financial calculations in your third party software and importantly the gap fees for your families.
There is no doubt that your families will be looking to understand how much better off they will be financially after the new changes take effect.
Last week we circulated a Member Alert about the CCS changes and managing expectations from families, media and government, which provided a detailed overview of the upcoming changes and links to the government's template materials for keeping your families informed. You can revisit that article here.
Family entitlements - expected timing
In order for the changes to take place, one important requirement will be for the parent entitlements to be updated as part of the CCS enrolment in your CCS software.
As fees are generally estimated on the entitlement within the CCS enrolment, the timing of those changes being visible will be critical to parents seeing any reduction in their gap fee.
ACA has been advised by the Department of Education that these entitlements should be visible on Monday 10 July, as part of the child's CCS enrolment in your third party software.
On Monday morning we encourage you to review the CCS entitlements of your families in your third party software and undertake whatever processes necessary to update or refresh those entitlements from the CCS IT system into your third party software.
In some software this will happen automatically, whilst in other software this will be a manual process that requires your input.
When will the changes take effect?
Once those new entitlements have been updated in your third party software, the new calculations can take place.
As there would be a wide variety of billing cycles across individual services in the sector, it is not possible to predict a solid date that all families will see their new reduced gap fee.
Depending on the billing cycle of your service, and when the estimation of gap fees occurs, parents may or may not see these changes in the first billing cycle beyond 10 July. However we would expect the reconciliation to balance out at some stage in the coming weeks after that date.
It is therefore particularly important to explain to your families how your billing cycle works and when they can expect to see these changes.
What if the changes to entitlements aren't visible on Monday?
If you can't see the changes to entitlements on Monday, they will most likely appear the following day.
We will be watching closely to see how this rolls out and continue to liaise with the Department of Education throughout next week, particularly if entitlements don’t update within a reasonable timeframe.
We hope that the changes from 10 July 2023 onwards improve the affordability to families as promised and have a positive impact as soon as practically possible.
PUBLISHED: 7 JULY 2023
SOURCE: ACA NATIONAL COMMITTEE
