NCS: funding agreements, attendance, and the Hive workflow

Participating in NCS requires Tusla registration and a current NCS funding agreement, activated through Early Years Hive once the programme-readiness steps are done — the scheme doesn't sit alongside registration, it depends on it. Fees and the service calendar submitted through the Hive have to match what parents are actually being charged; daylight between the two is the kind of gap an audit finds quickly.

Attendance recording has to reconcile with the service's own daily sign-in/out and room records, not just with whatever gets typed into the Hive separately — claims should never outrun what the attendance data can actually support, and reporting deadlines within the current agreement matter because a missed or inaccurate submission can delay payment or trigger a correction, not just a late mark.

Subsidy claims themselves need to rest on eligible children, eligible hours, and attendance evidence that actually backs them up — not split sessions or claims for a place that wasn't genuinely used. Retention has its own open question worth checking rather than assuming: earlier NCS agreement material commonly specified six years for financial records, but the current agreement is the one that actually governs, and it's worth confirming rather than carrying an old number forward as policy.

Bloomffy's NCS claim confirmation tooling exists because there's no public API into the Applicant Portal or Early Years Hive — a per-enrollment panel mirrors the Hive's own "Parent Confirmed: Yes/No" status, with individual claim segments tracked separately so staff don't lose track of which specific week is the actual lingering blocker, sorted by how close it is to the real CHICK expiry date plus the three-month cancellation deadline that follows it. A separate panel tracks the CHICK award's own expiry directly — never derived from an assumed fixed renewal period, always staff-entered — with reminders as it approaches, and it won't quietly keep reading "valid" past a date that's actually lapsed unverified.