Okay, so here's a little tid-bit about how to figure this out. First off the time that you should keep track on and claim only counts if it's time that you, your spouse, another family member or an employee spends working in the home for
daycare related activities during hours that children are not present. These hours can be added to your working hours to figure out what your time% is.
For example: If your hours are 6AM-6PM and your first child arrives at 6AM, your last child leaves at 6PM and there are no gaps in between and every morning from 5:30AM to 6:00AM you start preparing, arranging the room, setting up the toys for the kids whatever and every evening from 6:00PM to 6:30PM you spend time cleaning up and putting daycare things away then you can claim this time and should log these and keep track of them. Here are some examples of what you should log (when the kids are not there):
• Cleaning the rooms in your home that is used by your daycare
• Preparing food and meals for the DC kids
• Reading to find recipes for the DC (magazines, internet, books)
• Planning lesson plans
• Preparing lesson plans (getting the activities ready)
• Decorating the home (putting up posters, holiday decorations, putting up the crafts that the DC kids made)
• Record Keeping
• Planning menus
• Preparing shopping lists
• Interviews with prospective parents
• Talking to parents and other providers on the phone about daycare
• Research
•
Time spent networking on Daycare forums for advice!!!! Hint hint
Any time you spend doing daycare related things
while the kids are there like cooking and cleaning etc. don't count though. They only count if there are no DC kids in your home. In one of Tom Copeland's books he actually tells you to hang out and not do work like this until after hours so that you can claim it. His actual words are "What should you do when children are taking a nap? Rest, read a book, do nothing!"
.
More hours that don't count towards this are things like time spent away from the house like trainings, shopping etc. for daycare related things. For these you should keep track of the mileage but the actual time you spend doing these does not count. Also time spent on general house repairs or maintenance does not count such as cutting the lawn, replacing light bulbs etc. This is all stuff that you would have to do anyway whether or not you had a daycare. These types of things can only be counted if more time was spent on this because of the business such as having to repaint the home every year because of the damage caused by children.
Theres an entire chapter in Tom Copeland's book called Family Childcare Record Keeping Guide titled Figuring Your Time-Space Percentage that talks all about how to do all of this. I highly recommend this book. Borrow it, buy it, steal it (ok maybe not lol) or check it out at the library.
*** On that note, I keep track of my DC related hours when the kids aren't here in a notebook. Wondering if anyone had an actual log that they use that I could see. I'm trying to adopt something easier for me to fill out and keep track of.