Claims Guide

After you have received your award, you need to provide your chosen Service Provider with the Child Identifier Code Key (CHICK) that you received, along with your child’s Date of Birth. Your CHICK can be found under the ‘My Awards’ section of the applicant portal, as shown circled in red;

Using your child’s CHICK and Date of Birth, your Service Provider will be able to retrieve your award details. You need to arrange with your Service Provider the hours of childcare that you need. Once this is agreed, your Service Provider can then make a claim for payment based on the hours that you agreed. You will be notified when they have made a claim on your behalf.

If you receive a standard hours (20 hours) Income Assessed award with a rate of less than €4.81, a Universal Award may be more beneficial depending on the hours of childcare you require. Please contact the Parent Support Centre on 01 906 8530 for more information.

You need to review and approve your claim before subsidy can be paid. In order to do this, you need to access the ‘My Claims’ section of the portal, which can be done by clicking ‘My Claims’ followed by ‘View Claims’ as shown:

Once in the ‘My Claims’ view, you are presented with a list of all current claims in date order with the most recent end date first, as shown below. A claim that requires a user action will be marked in yellow. 

You can toggle between current, draft, and historic claims using the dropdown menu to the left of the screen (circled in red). Clicking the link for the CHICK on the left of the claim, or the magnifying glass symbol on the right, will bring you to the Claim Details screen.

The ‘Claim Details’ screen gives complete information on the claim, including Claim start and end dates, weeks in segment, hours claimed, and subsidy rate.

It is most important that these details are correct. If they are not you will have to return to your Service Provider in order for them to make a new claim with the correct details. You should not confirm a claim with incorrect details.

If your weekly claim pattern does not vary from week to week, you can confirm the claim from this screen, using the ‘Confirm’ button in the bottom left corner. If the confirm button is not on this screen, you must click the ‘View Weeks’ button in order to confirm individual weeks.  

Clicking ‘View Weeks’ brings you to a second screen that displays a week-by-week breakdown of subsidy rate and total hours. Once you are satisfied that your claim details are correct, click the ‘Confirm’ button.

After clicking ‘Confirm’, the user is asked once more to Confirm or Cancel as shown below. Once the claim is confirmed, payments can be paid to your chosen Service Provider.

If you need to change the hours required on your claim, you should ask the service provider to do this for you. You will receive a notification with the updated claim details. You will need to approve the updated claim details in the same way as a new claim.

Once payments begin to the Service Provider, you can view the subsidies that are paid by clicking ‘Subsidies Paid’ under the ‘MyClaims’ option. An allocation is simply a payment that is due to be paid to a Service Provider. Once a payment is made, the date it was approved is populated under the ‘Payment Approved’ column.

Service Providers may occasionally need to make adjustments to a week’s payment in a claim. This is known as a correction. The details of a correction will appear here in the Subsidies Paid screen, and you will also receive a notification whenever this occurs.

Once you have approved the claim, your child’s attendance should match the claimed hours. If your child has been absent from the service provider for 4 full consecutive weeks, the claim will be ended. Also if your child has under-attended for 12 consecutive weeks your claim hours will be reduced to a an average of the previous 12 weeks attendance

If your child was absent or under-attending due to a valid exceptional circumstance you can submit an exemption request. The steps to submit an exemption request are as follows;

You need to first obtain an exemption request form from your Service Provider. Exemption Requests are accessed on the portal using the Queries button which is located in the bottom left hand corner of the portal. Clicking this brings you to the Queries screen shown below, where all current queries are listed. In order to submit a new query, select the ‘New Query’ button on the right hand side of the screen, shown below.

Selecting this brings you to the ‘New Query’ screen. In order to submit an Exemption Request you need to select ‘Exemption Request’ from the ‘Query Type’ dropdown menu. You need to fill in the ‘Summary’ and ‘Description’ fields before submitting. You can then upload the exemption request form by clicking ‘browse’ and attaching it from where it is stored on your device.

Once the exemption request is submitted, you are returned to the queries screen where your exemption request is now displayed with an associated Query Number.

Your Service Provider can also submit the exemption request on your behalf if you so choose.