To continue with the theme of the “joys” of getting paid in the NDIS, today we’re going to look at the dreaded accounts payable, the unpaid, outstanding invoices that mess with your cashflow! I know, not the most exciting topic, but SO important for your business.
Okay, so when it comes to getting paid in the NDIS, as you probably know, there's three different ways that it happens. You've got agency managed, where you claim it directly from the portal and as long as you've got your service bookings up to date and everything lines up, you get paid the next day. Fantastic.
The other two ways are for plan managed participants and self manage participants. These are the ones that can potentially take longer for your payments to come through, for a couple of different reasons. But some of the challenges I see people having is not having a good process for follow up, that is regularly followed.
But having certain understandings about self and plan managed invoicing, as well can help get you paid quicker.
Self Managed
So firstly, the self managed clients are effectively like a private client to you. So it is up to you, and depending on the supports you provide, whether you set policies in your business where you ask for payment up front on the day when the session happens, or whether you invoice them that day for them to pay as soon as they can, or you invoice them once a week.
If it's a type of service that has multiple touch points in a week, you might just want to do it once a week. But have that process in place and have a look at ways to make it as easy as possible for those clients to pay. If they're self managing their NDIS funds, they're probably getting multiple emails and invoices each week. Having to organise them and pay them and then claim them back themselves from the NDIS. We already know what a task that is right?! So making it as simple as possible for your client will help get you paid as quickly as possible.
That could be setting up in your software and having a discussion with that client that you would keep their credit card details securely and when you have a session, they give permission to charge that and then you just send them a paid copy of the receipt for them to claim or something similar. Otherwise you just have the expectation that they pay you within a certain number of days and plan your cashflow around it.
The main thing is that we have that understanding that they have a lot on their plate, managing their life with a disability AND alot of paperwork to juggle, so any way we can make it easier for them is a win for them and you.
Plan Managed
Then when we look at plan managed, I've had multiple conversations and questions from providers about why plan managers often take over a week to pay invoices. Why can't they pay it straight away? And the reality is that there's a few things that can cause delays with plan managers.
They have potentially a very high volume of invoices coming to them all day every day. And they will have their process for handling that workload. Some handle it better than others.
Is that depending on the agreements that they have set up with the participant, they may need to get the participants approval for every invoice before they pay it and if that participant takes a couple of days to respond, or questions the invoice, then that can delay your payment.
And then some plan managers might have a schedule for making payments. They might make payments once or twice a week, and if your invoice gets to them and is approved the day after they've just made their weekly pay run, then you're waiting another week for that payment to come through.
So it's just understanding their process and factoring that into your cash flow planning. Knowing that for self and plan managed it can potentially be a week for those invoices to get paid. And if that's not how you want to run your business, it's up to you to set those policies and have those conversations with your self managed participants to set the expectations and make a process for how they will pay straight away.
The other thing with plan managers is if there's something not quite right on an invoice, whether it's that you don't have the right details on there, or one of your support dates falls outside of the service booking, quite often we've found that they won't proactively come back to you and tell you that this invoice needs updating or or can't be paid for for XYZ reason. I’m not sure what they do with them at their end, but it's not until you chase them up that they will tell you what's happened and why it hasn't been paid.
So that's why it's super important to have a regular follow up process that is done weekly, without fail to keep those kinds of delays in payment to a minimum.
Our Process
What our process tends to look like is we send the invoice in the usual weekly claiming and invoicing run, and then a certain number of days later, if it hasn't been paid we will resend the invoice just in case it got missed as a reminder, and then a certain amount of time after that, if it still hasn't been paid. Then you were making a phone call to follow up. It's not a nasty “Why haven't you paid” phone call. It's a “hi just checking you received this invoice. Are there any issues with it?” And then if they have and it's all fine then “can you let us know when it 's going to be paid? So we can make a note” and that's usually enough to clear up any issues and give them that reminder that that we're expecting that payment.
Oh, yeah. The other, possibly obvious step in that whole follow up process is making sure you're keeping an eye on the payments coming in and marking off the invoices as paid so that you're only chasing up the actual outstanding invoices.
That's where having your reconciling in Xero or your accounting software is important. If you're not keeping up on that, what's showing as outstanding may be huge, but you actually got all those payments sitting there. It may seem obvious but it's definitely something that I've seen happen a few times. And that’s why having a detailed process or checklist makes a huge difference, so steps don’t get missed and you’re not wasting time and money.
This is just part of the process that we follow for our clients that outsource their NDIS billing to us, so if you want to get that off your plate so you or your current admin team can focus on other important tasks, get in touch with us!
NDIS Training On The Way!
Alternatively, we are finally getting close to launching our first round of training on how we recommend you setup your whole NDIS billing workflow, from Intake to claiming, to the stuff I’ve talked about today. So if that sounds interesting to you, make sure you sign up for our Cheatsheet below, to get on our mailing list and be the first to find out when the training is ready.
See you next time, with more tips to help you simplify, outsource and grow.
