​Core Funding Caps: How to Stay Compliant Without Living in a Spreadsheet

After transforming how 125+ school aged childcare providers in Ireland handle Core Funding Caps admin, we’ve seen firsthand how time consuming and all-encompassing compliance and monitoring becomes. The 4-week and 8-week rules are straightforward in theory, but in practice, monitoring attendance across multiple children, multiple sessions, and multiple weeks, and sending alerts before a child tips over their cap, is the kind of work that eats hours every month.

But it doesn’t have to be that way anymore.

Here's a breakdown of what you’re typically required to do, where the frustrations and slip ups often occur, and how that now all changes with Enrolmy.

How the 4-week and 8-week rules work

The cap rules limit how many hours a child can access Core Funding-supported provision within a specified rolling window. There are two thresholds:

The 4-week cap: A child cannot exceed a defined number of hours of Core Funding supported care within any consecutive 4-week period.

The 8-week cap: A separate, higher threshold applies over any consecutive 8-week window.

The precise hourly thresholds are set by the Department of Children and administered by Pobal, they can change year to year with programme updates, so school aged childcare providers should always verify the current figures directly with Pobal or on the gov.ie childcare programme guidance.

What matters operationally for before and afterschool clubs and holiday clubs are the monitoring requirements, not just the caps themselves. Administrators are required to:

Track each NCS/Core Funding child's cumulative attendance across the relevant window

Identify when a child is approaching the threshold

Notify the parent before the child exceeds the cap, not after

Record that notification was sent

All steps are easy to miss and make mistakes.

What "sending an alert" actually means

The requirement to notify parents before a cap is breached isn't bureaucratic. It serves a practical purpose: parents need to know that their child's attendance is approaching a limit so they can make an informed decision about whether to continue booking sessions under Core Funding, reduce hours, or move to a private fee arrangement for the remaining period.

From a compliance perspective, "sending an alert" means:

You have tracked and identified that a specific child's attendance is approaching the 4-week or 8-week threshold

You have communicated this to the parent in advance, before the cap is breached

You have a record of having done so (date, method, content)

That last point matters for Pobal inspections. The record doesn't need to be elaborate, a note in your booking system that says "Cap alert sent to [parent name] on [date] re: 4-week threshold" is sufficient. What you cannot do is say "we sent them an email" and have no evidence of it.

Why most providers discover cap breaches too late

The honest answer: because cap monitoring is done retrospectively, not in real time.

A typical monitoring workflow looks like this:

A coordinator checks attendance at the end of the week

They manually add up attendance for each NCS child over the past 4 weeks

They notice that two children are close to the threshold

They try to remember whether they've told the parents, and whether they told them in time

And if this administrator oversees multiple settings or franchises, they repeat the process again and again.

The problem is that "end of the week" is often too late. A child who has 3 sessions left before the 4-week cap is breached needs an alert sent before those sessions happen, not after. If the check is weekly and the breach happens mid-week, the alert arrives after the fact.

There's also the scaling problem. Monitoring one child's attendance against a rolling 4-week and 8-week window simultaneously is simple. Doing it for 30 children across three session types, with some children on different NCS subsidy categories, is not. The more children in your setting, the higher the chance of a manual monitoring error.

The monitoring problem at scale

To understand why this is hard, consider what you'd need to track manually for a setting of 40 NCS children:

For each child: cumulative hours in the current 4-week window, cumulative hours in the current 8-week window, the exact date each window resets, current booking schedule for the coming weeks

For each alert: which children are approaching threshold, whether an alert has been sent, when it was sent, whether you received a parent response

For the setting overall: whether any children have inadvertently breached a cap, what the remediation looks like if they have

That's not a single spreadsheet, it's a monitoring system. And maintaining it accurately, in real time, alongside everything else a SAC coordinator does is frustrating.

The SAC operators who manage this reliably don't do it manually. They use a booking and attendance platform that tracks cumulative attendance automatically, calculates approaching thresholds in real time, and surfaces alerts before they become breaches.

What compliant cap monitoring can look like now

With Enrolmy, Core Funding Caps monitoring can finally be easy; here's what it looks like from the provider's side:

Attendance is digitall recorded at the point of check-in. Every session, every child, every parent signature, every sign in/out time stamp, recorded and logged in real time, not reconstructed at the end of the day or the week.

Cumulative attendance is calculated automatically. The system tracks each child's rolling 4-week and 8-week totals, updating as each session is recorded.

Approaching-threshold alerts are generated automatically. When a child's attendance is within a defined number of hours of the cap, the provider sees visual alerts in their Enrolmy environment. The timing is configurable, some providers want to be alerted when a child has 5 hours of headroom; others prefer 3.

Parent notification is sent and logged. The provider can then send the required alert to the parent, from within the system, so the record of having sent it is automatic. No separate note required.

Breaches are prevented, not just recorded. The system flags any booking that would push a child over the cap before it's confirmed, giving the coordinator the option to hold the session under a private fee arrangement instead.

This is how Enrolmy works for Irish SAC providers managing Core Funding. The monitoring that used to be a weekly manual task becomes a background process, visible when you need it, automatic when you don't.

Want to see how cap monitoring and NCS reconciliation look inside the platform? Book a free 20-minute demo with Enrolmy — we'll walk through a live setting with real attendance data.

Core Funding and NCS: managing both

Most Irish SAC children are simultaneously on NCS and Core Funding. The two schemes are administered separately by Pobal but affect the same sessions and the same attendance records.

This means your attendance data is doing double duty: it's the basis for the Pobal NCS subsidy payment and the basis for Core Funding cap monitoring. An error in attendance recording, a session marked as attended when the child was absent, or vice versa affects both.

Providers who manage this well treat attendance recording as a single, authoritative source of truth, not two systems side by side. The child checks in. The record is created once. Both NCS reconciliation and Core Funding cap monitoring draw from the same data.

Providers who manage it less well maintain separate records for NCS and Core Funding, one for the Pobal NCS portal, one for the spreadsheet they use to track caps. When those records diverge (and they do), the downstream consequences are reconciliation errors, cap monitoring failures, and Pobal compliance questions.

The practical answer is a single booking and attendance platform that handles both. Not because it's tidier, because it's the only approach that's reliably accurate at the scale and complexity of a real SAC setting.

And thankfully, Enrolmy Software does both.

The providers who've stopped worrying about cap breaches didn't get there by building a better spreadsheet. They got there by building the monitoring into their booking and attendance platform so it runs automatically, surfaces alerts before they're urgent, and creates a record without anyone having to remember to create one.

Get this sorted is before the new term begins. Book a free demo with Enrolmy to see how your provision could handle NCS reconciliation, Core Funding Caps monitoring, and parent billing, in one place.

Frequently asked questions

What is Core Funding and what are the Caps?

Core Funding is a Government grant paid directly to childcare providers, including SAC settings. It was introduced to reduce the cost of childcare for families by providing providers with a funding stream that offsets fees, effectively allowing providers to charge parents less without cutting income.

For SAC settings, Core Funding supports beforeschool, afterschool, and wraparound care provision. Providers who participate in Core Funding receive a grant based on their staff qualifications, hours of service, and a calculation that Pobal administers.

The Attendance Caps are the mechanism that prevents Core Funding from being paid for attendance that exceeds defined limits per child over defined windows. The premise is straightforward: Core Funding is designed to make regular, ongoing childcare more affordable not to fund unlimited or irregular access. The cap rules define what "regular" looks like.

What is the current hourly threshold for the 4-week and 8-week caps?
The thresholds are set by Pobal and updated with each programme year. Always verify the current figures directly with Pobal through your provider portal or the Pobal Core Funding programme page. Do not rely on figures from a previous year without checking.

What happens if a child exceeds their cap?
The hours in excess of the cap are not covered by Core Funding, the provider must either absorb the cost or charge the parent privately for those sessions. Providers who exceed caps without having sent a pre-breach alert to the parent may face compliance questions from Pobal during inspection or settlement.

Do the cap rules apply to all children in my setting?
Only to children who are accessing your service under Core Funding. Families paying privately (not through NCS or Core Funding) are not subject to cap rules.

How do I record that I've sent a cap alert to a parent?
A note in your booking system or stuck to the computer screen, a copy of the email, or a record in your communication log, any contemporaneous record is sufficient. What matters is that you can produce evidence of having notified the parent before the breach, not a specific format.

Can a child come back after hitting the cap?
Yes. A child who has hit the 4-week cap can continue attending but not under Core Funding for that period. You can offer to hold their place on a private fee basis for the remainder of that 4-week window, and they return to Core Funding-supported attendance when the window resets. How you handle this depends on your setting's policy and the family's circumstances.

Does Core Funding apply to all age groups in SAC?
Core Funding supports SAC provision for school-age children (generally 4+ years through primary school age). The specific age eligibility and hours supported can vary, check the Pobal programme guidance for the 2026-27 year.