DRAFT - not finished yet
If your doors closed leading up to 6/4, when free childcare started, or you closed your service during the free child care period, and you’re just starting to reopen, please read on.
The following links and screenshots will help you quickly find what you need to read and do, in order to navigate the remaining free childcare period - 6th April to 12th July 2020.
CLOSED period
Free childcare:
COVID Payments And you will receive COVID payments for the period you are open, if eligible and with at least one child in attendance.
From July 13th we return to the normal CCS processing: submitting attendances, receiving CCS where relevant & parent paying the GAP. From July 13th you can also vary/cancel & resubmit any relevant attendances from 2019/2020 financial year un to 5/4/2020.
You should be able to update bookings, update session codes and submit enrolments, IS Claims, even query attendances. You cant however submit, vary or cancel any attendances this financial year until the free childcare finishes.
Free ChildCare + COVID Payments
If you are re-opening you can alert the Dept of Education, so you can get paid your COVID payments for any period prior to July 12th that you have one or more children attending your service. Your Fees must be capped at your Feb 23rd to Mar 1st period, (which is the reference period the COVID payments are based on)
COVID Payments are placed in the COVID TAB - as they are lump sums, not attached to any attendances as such.
I can see you have been paid these. If you have been shut you will need to alert the dept of Education. These payments will need to be withdrawn.
Support - Chat
I rang but you had left. Let me know in chat when you are back if you still need a call (after you read below).
Your SC Account
You are paid up to date & none of your staff are end dated - so you should be able to log in.
COVID Help
if you can log into SmartCentral, then I suggest you go to Help -> Staff and read through the Top Questions this month which relate to a lot of the COVID changes, we have had to do for this period. Our Help, plus along with FAQs from the government should bring you up to date. Then if you still have questions, please ask for one of us in chat.
https://www.dese.gov.au/covid-19/childcare/childcare-faq
The ones with green arrows might be worth reading first.
Attendances up to 5/4
On Thurs 2/4, the govt decided from Mon 6/4 childcare was free, the attendances for the financial year would be locked as is and you wouldn’t be able to submit, vary or cancel any attendances for this financial year.
Knowing some of our clients submit Mondays(7/4) and even later (we have some clients who submit fortnightly) we issued group emails to say mark the rolls and submit everything up to 5/4 on Friday 3/4.
When we could see that not everyone had read their email and there were still attendances not submitted we made the call to submit them for people (this was conveyed in the email too)
We didn’t want services to miss out on their CCS for the weeks leading up to 5/4.
Unfortunately some services didn’t put holidays into SC, so bookings still generated the rolls and therefore attendances. These got submitted on 5/4.
If they were not meant to be submitted, we apologise but in the rush of that week, we had to make a call.
If they were not meant to be submitted you will have to cancel them and the CCS will be withdrawn. Unfortunately you can’t cancel them until the COVID period ends. The end date is currently 12th July, so you should be able to cancel them 13th July. The government will probably issue an email to that affect.
B2B Proda Device
Your device is expiring 27/6, about a week out I suggest you disable/remove the current B2B device and create a new one and reactivate your software
The help to disable/remove your old device & create a new one is below. https://wiki.smartcentral.net/Reactivating-Connection-to-PRODA
Once you reactivate the software it should return with a blue/green headings like this:
If it comes back with yellow/red headings there is an error - please ask us in chat to help you fix that. If you submit 5 times using a B2B device in error it will be locked and you will have to create a new one and reactivate all over again.
Hope that all helps
https://docs.education.gov.au/documents/covid-19-faqs-inclusion-support-program
https://www.dese.gov.au/covid-19/childcare/childcare-faq