Total School-Holiday Childcare Gaps Day by Day — Free
Holiday clubs publish opening hours; your work pattern publishes required hours. The stressful number is the gap between them, day by day — and surplus hours on one day do not cover shortfalls on another.
The proof surface
Cost-splitting tools answer who pays for childcare. This docket measures time instead: per-day required hours against per-day offered hours, with shortfalls summed and surpluses deliberately not banked. It does not price care, check club quality or verify opening dates.
InputDay code | required hours | club open hours; daily shortfall review mark (hours)
Rare deviceCost-splitting tools answer who pays for childcare. This docket measures time instead: per-day required hours against per-day offered hours, with shortfalls summed and surpluses deliberately not banked. It does not price care, check club quality or verify opening dates.
Output artifactTotal uncovered hours with row-by-row context
Cost$0 local calculation · no card, paid key, subscription or signup · proposed filing price is not for sale
Sample, not your facts: Illustrative inputs: Mon | 8 | 6; Tue | 8 | 9. Daily shortfall review mark (hours) = 1. Total uncovered hours: 2 uncovered hours. All records are invented.
Before using the childcare-gap docket
Use one row per holiday day with the hours you genuinely need supervised on that day, not a weekly average spread flat. Club hours mean the hours actually available to your child — subtract any lunch closure, registration window or session boundary your club enforces, under one stated convention. If two children attend different clubs, either keep separate rows per child or combine only days where the same club covers both. The review mark is your own tolerance for a daily gap before you arrange something else; it is not a service standard. The calculator cannot know about grandparents, sitters or swaps you have not entered, so treat its total as the uncovered portion of the plan you supplied.
Why the flat version breaks
Spreading weekly hours flat across days
Dividing a 40-hour requirement into five eights hides the half days, inset days and trip days that make holiday cover awkward. Enter the real daily shape even when it is uneven; the docket's value is precisely that unevenness.
Banking surplus hours against other days
A club that runs long on Thursday does not extend itself into Friday's shortfall. If your real arrangement genuinely allows moving hours — a flexible sitter, for example — model that as its own row rather than letting a surplus silently cancel a gap.
Counting published hours as guaranteed hours
Holiday schedules change: staff training days, minimum-child closures and bank holidays move the real offer. Confirm the dates the club actually runs before treating an offered-hours figure as fixed, and keep confirmation messages in your own records.
How to work the childcare-gap docket
List the holiday days before the hours
Write the actual holiday dates you need covered, then attach a required-hours figure to each one. A week of nine-to-fives and a week of half-day Fridays produce different rows. Anonymous day codes are enough; the docket never needs the child's name or the club's identity.
Enter offered hours as the usable window
Take the club's published opening hours and reduce them by any session breaks, late-opening days or pickup rules that apply to your child. If the offer is 'wraparound 8–6 but core session only 9–4', decide once which number you are counting and use it consistently across every row.
Sum shortfalls, never surpluses
For each day compute required minus offered and keep only positive results; negative results become zero because a Tuesday surplus cannot supervise Monday. Add the remaining positives for the total uncovered hours. The row workings show each day's surplus separately so the no-banking assumption stays visible.
Close the gap with a named arrangement
Take the flagged days to whoever can cover them — family, a sitter, a second club, swapped work days — and record the arrangement next to the row in your own notes. Ask the club to confirm holiday opening times in writing if a gap hinges on them. The docket's total is a planning quantity, not a judgment on any family's setup.
What the childcare-gap docket separates
Question
Before
Inspect this instead
Spreading weekly hours flat across days
Dividing a 40-hour requirement into five eights hides the half days, inset days and trip days that make holiday cover awkward. Enter the real daily shape even when it is uneven; the docket's value is precisely that unevenness.
Enter offered hours as the usable window
Banking surplus hours against other days
A club that runs long on Thursday does not extend itself into Friday's shortfall. If your real arrangement genuinely allows moving hours — a flexible sitter, for example — model that as its own row rather than letting a surplus silently cancel a gap.
Sum shortfalls, never surpluses
Counting published hours as guaranteed hours
Holiday schedules change: staff training days, minimum-child closures and bank holidays move the real offer. Confirm the dates the club actually runs before treating an offered-hours figure as fixed, and keep confirmation messages in your own records.
Close the gap with a named arrangement
This childcare-gap docket replaces a manual count or calculation, not source verification or the responsible person’s review.
Run it on the samples, right here
FIRST-LOAD
HYPOTHESIS / PROTOTYPE — checkout unavailable. Calculation is local. A draft is saved automatically in this browser profile when storage is available; Reset to sample clears it. Optional Pro history stores only five summaries and has its own deletion control. State links encode your inputs and can remain in browser history, clipboard or recipients’ records; share only non-sensitive rows. Optional external AI formatting leaves this device. The required site analytics beacon reports page activity; shared URLs contain encoded inputs. Do not treat an encoded URL as private. The calculator has no input-collection endpoint.
Scheduling arithmetic only, not childcare quality, safeguarding or entitlement advice. Confirm actual opening hours and any funded-hours rules with the club or your local authority, and arrange supervision with the responsible adults before relying on a plan.
Data note: The childcare-gap docket processes Day code | required hours | club open hours locally. Starter/sample selection and Run compute in this tab; no input is sent by the calculator. A local draft may be saved; explicit state-link sharing or optional external AI formatting can disclose inputs. Use non-sensitive labels.
Go deeper: the companion app files the same reading as a clerk's docket sheet
The article demo above runs without limits. The companion app keeps a local history, exports the rows as CSV, prints the childcare-gap docket reading, and holds your drafts on this device — one complete free app run; the proposed $4 one-time filing layer is not for sale.
The childcare-gap docket answer stays complete for free. The proposed $4 one-time filing layer adds row CSV, print and five local reading summaries, not hidden answers. Checkout is unavailable; the article demo remains unlimited.
Scheduling arithmetic only, not childcare quality, safeguarding or entitlement advice. Confirm actual opening hours and any funded-hours rules with the club or your local authority, and arrange supervision with the responsible adults before relying on a plan.
What this is built on
Method: For each day compute required minus offered and keep only positive results; negative results become zero because a Tuesday surplus cannot supervise Monday. Add the remaining positives for the total uncovered hours. The row workings show each day's surplus separately so the no-banking assumption stays visible.
All sample records, dates, quantities and labels are invented. No outside policy, contract, rate, clock offset, measurement or accessibility standard is represented as verified.
Google’s official pricing documentation, fetched 2026-10-01, says AI Studio is free in available regions. Optional formatting may require a Google account; manual local entry requires none. Limits can change and free-tier content may be used to improve products. Do not send private records.
Before: holiday childcare felt like one undifferentiated scramble. After: each day carries its own required, offered and uncovered hours.
Monday needs eight hours and the club offers six, leaving a two-hour gap. Tuesday needs eight and the club offers nine, but the one surplus hour stays on Tuesday; it does not move to Monday. The total uncovered time is therefore two hours, not one. This no-banking rule reflects childcare as it is actually lived: a club hour on Tuesday cannot supervise a child on Monday.
The club is closed or not used on Wednesday, so the four required hours are wholly uncovered. Entering zero for the offered hours is the honest way to record that. The docket flags the row because four exceeds the supplied one-hour review mark. Finding a gap is not a criticism of any arrangement; it is the input to the next planning step.
Required and offered hours match exactly, so the day is fully covered and equality produces no flag. An exact match is still an assumption worth confirming — opening times can shift on holiday dates — but arithmetically the gap is zero. A day with more offered than required also scores zero; surplus hours are never negative cover.
Optional AI formatting, never the calculation
Manual entry completes this childcare-gap docket for free without signup. If available to you, the free AI Studio interface linked in the sources may format fictional or non-sensitive notes; external access may require an account. No API key or AI call is built into this tool. Free-tier content may be used to improve products. Review each cell and transcribe it to the labeled row schema; do not paste the JSON object into the row box.
Format only these fictional or non-sensitive notes for a childcare-gap docket. Return strict JSON shaped as {"rows": [{"label": "string", "cells": ["string", "string"]}], "setting": "string"}. The columns are Day code | required hours | club open hours; the setting is Daily shortfall review mark (hours). Keep all supplied strings and quantities exactly; do not calculate, infer missing entries, invent dates or add advice. If any required value is missing, return an empty rows array and ask me for it separately. I will verify every cell against my source and manually transcribe rows using vertical bars before running the local calculator.
An AI response is not executed, fetched or trusted as a result. Missing values remain questions; the strict local parser checks the rows you actually enter.