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I think it depends on how your insurance company does it. With ours, we pay the daycare and then submit a claim to the insurance company; they then reimburse us.

Some companies might be different...with my old job, I had an FSA health account (not a dependent care account) and I was given a 'debit' card to use so I never had to submit a claim or wait for reimbursement. Since I didn't do a dependent care FSA through that job, I'm not sure if that would have been the same. With the insurance we have now, for both the FSA health and dependent care we have to wait for reimbursement, which is not as good.

This is the way it worked at my old job. There is a plan year contribution cap of I think $2500. It is taken out of my paycheck pretax so that's another savings there. I payed daycare via my FSA debit card. With that method money is payed into the FSA Dependent care accoutn from each paycheck so the money has to be accumulated. So there has been certain weeks there was not enough money in the account to pay that week's tuition until enough money accumulated.

The way I understand it at my new job it will be the claim method mentioned above and with that way it seems all the money you plan to contribute each plan year is available upfront. So there's never an issue of not enough money.
With this method, @AbbyCadabby: is there a contribution cap?

I can have up to 5K a year put in the acct. pre-tax. I pay the daycare directly and then am reimbursed for that money from the acct.

@regberadaisy: I think the cap for us is 5K but ours is like yours in that the money has to be accumulated so when I submitted my claim for January tuition, there wasn't enough to reimburse me the full amount. I'm probably going to have to wait until the Summer before submitting the following months to let the money accumulate. This is a really annoying method - at my old job, the full amount of the contribution was available immediately, which was SO much better.