The RS7 Early Childhood Funding Return is a condition of funding for every licensed early childhood service in New Zealand. It is not optional, it is not occasional, and it is not difficult in principle.
It becomes difficult for a specific reason, and it is worth naming up front: the return asks you to report on what actually happened, and most services keep the record of what actually happened across a wall planner, a group chat and somebody's memory of which reliever covered which room in week four.
This is a plain-English guide to what the return involves and, more usefully, to the staffing record underneath it.
What the RS7 actually is
The RS7 reports the funded child hours your service is funded for, along with the rate each of those hours is funded at.
It is submitted three times a year, through ELI. Services submitting on paper face an earlier deadline than those submitting electronically, because paper returns take longer to process — a small detail that catches out services that have always done it one way and assume the dates are the same.
That is the whole shape of it. Hours, rates, three times a year.
Why the staffing record is the hard part
The return itself is arithmetic. The evidence behind it is not.
An accurate return depends on your staffing and attendance records agreeing with what actually happened on the floor. Ratios have to have been met. The people working had to have been qualified to work. And the hours you are reporting have to match hours somebody actually worked and somebody actually approved.
For permanent staff on a fixed roster, that is straightforward. For relief and casual cover it is where things come apart, because relief is exactly the part of the operation that gets arranged quickly, informally, and at 7am.
The ratios the record has to support
Licensed centre-based services must maintain minimum adult-to-child ratios of 1 adult to 3 children under 2, and 1 adult to 10 children aged 2 and over. Those ratios must be maintained at all times — including while staff take breaks, and on excursions.
A reliever arriving forty minutes late is not only a staffing inconvenience. It is a period where the ratio may not have been met, and if your record cannot show when they actually started, it cannot show that it was.
The certificates the record has to support
Teachers require an approved qualification, New Zealand registration and a current practising certificate from the Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand.
There is one edge case that is worth knowing and that catches services out constantly: a registered teacher whose practising certificate has expired may still relieve, provided they do fewer than 20 half-days of relieving in a calendar year.
That is a genuinely useful provision. It is also a counter that somebody has to keep, per person, across a whole year. Very few services are counting it accurately on a spreadsheet, and the ones that are usually have one person doing it from memory.
Separately, under the Children's Act 2014, children's workers must be safety checked before they start, and re-checked every three years.
A practical checklist
Ahead of a return, these are the things worth being able to produce without reconstructing them.
- Every booking, with its date, duration and room
- Who worked each one, and their qualification status on that day
- Approved hours, both as submitted and as approved
- Practising certificate and safety-check currency on the day worked
- Half-day counts for any reliever working on an expired certificate
- A full change history, including cancellations and who made them
The test for each is the same: can you produce it for a specific day six weeks ago, without asking anybody? If the answer is no, that is the gap the return will find.
Where software fits, and where it does not
Being precise about this matters more than usual on a page about compliance.
Aroha Connect does not prepare your RS7 return, does not submit it, and does not make your service compliant. Your service remains responsible for the return and for the obligations behind it. Any vendor telling you otherwise is selling you something that does not exist.
What the platform does is hold the staffing side of the evidence: a complete, timestamped record of every booking — who worked it, what they were qualified to do at the time, and the hours you approved. Certificate and safety-check expiry dates are tracked with alerts, so a lapse is something you are told about rather than something you discover.
The difference at return time is that you are reconciling against real data instead of reconstructing a term from memory.
That is a narrower claim than "RS7 compliance, sorted". It is also the true one, and on a funding return the difference between those two sentences is the entire point.
Ratios, practising certificates, safety checks and relief cover, configured for schools, kura and licensed early learning services.
