A little while ago I created a video about the “Joys getting paid as an NDIS service provider” and it has been one of our more popular videos. So today I’m going to dig a little deeper into some of the ways you can improve your billing process to get you paid quicker.
We know there are lots of moving parts when it comes to NDIS claiming and the plans of your participants. So let’s have a look at some of the important pieces of information that you need to keep track of, and HOW you could potentially keep track of them, to make life easier and keep your cashflow.. flowing.
Keeping Track of Funding
First up, when it comes to service bookings and service agreements for your participants, there's tracking the funds left, or knowing how much time you've got left to work with them in the current plan period. You obviously need to know how much funding they have approved for your supports, how much you've used, and how much time you've got left. This is important to stay on top of so you don't go over and end up working for nothing, and to make sure that you can get as close to achieving your participants goals in the time that you have available with them.
So how do you keep track of that the most efficient way? A lot of practice management systems that cater for NDIS providers will have this function built into them. You set it up at the beginning of working with someone, and as you have appointments with them, or time that you're spending working for them on reports or coordination, the PMS will automatically deduct that from the service booking amount. That's definitely the easiest way and there's so many different practice management systems out there. I talked about this a little bit in a previous blog post which I'll link to below.
But if you don't currently have software that handles this well, the main, and simplest other option you have is a spreadsheet. We've done this for clients before and kept a spreadsheet with info about:
Funding type - whether they are plan or self managed or agency managed,
The practitioner working with them,
Relevant support line items, if you have multiple services.
Plan dates and
the amount of funding you have for them.
Obviously that's going to be a bit of a manual process to keep track of, but rather than having to go in every time you do something for that person, if you're doing a weekly claiming process, you could just add a step to go through at the end and update that spreadsheet with the total amount that was claimed for each person for the week. So it’s a relatively quick extra step once a week, and if it’s updated the same time every week, practitioners can easily deduct the time they’ve spent during the current week to get a pretty accurate update.
Staying On Top Of Plan End Dates
Tied in very closely to the plans funding amounts, is the plan end dates. And I'm talking about this separately because it can be a curly one, as you probably already know, because if the participant has an early plan review or some other change to their plan and you're not their support coordinator, then you might not find out until you go to make your next claim. Sometimes support coordinators don't even find out straight away!
So you may think you still have months left in the current funding, but then you find out the service booking was ended a week ago by the NDIA and you’re scrambling to get a new agreement in place so you can claim the work you’ve completed.
I have 2 suggestions to help with this issue:
I recommend doing your claims at least weekly so that if a service booking does end suddenly, you're not not too far behind and not going to be too far out of pocket while you're finding out about the new one.
Something that we've come across recently that has worked really well is a relatively new report in Proda….. to download your active service bookings. You can download it as a CSV file, which will then open in Excel or Google Sheets and that will let you see at a glance all your service booking end dates. If you're keeping track of your service bookings and funding amounts in a spreadsheet, then you can actually very quickly match the two spreadsheets together. Or if you’re using a practice management system to keep track of your funding, quite often you can do an export of service booking data and match that to the Proda export. It could be another relatively quick weekly task to see if any of your service bookings have unexpectedly ended, or are coming up for review. So you can get on top of them before it becomes an issue with not getting paid.
Keeping on Top Of Claim Errors
So what if you DO have a few errors from your claims that need following up and new SA’s put in place before you can claim. Then you need to keep track of those unpaid claims so that they can be claimed once the funding is back in place. You don’t want these $ slipping through the cracks!
And if you're listening to this going “of course! that's kept in our PMS” or it's something that you know is under control, then awesome. But I have seen multiple businesses where, depending on the software or processes they have in place, it's not always automatic. And then sometimes these errors may automatically be saved, but they’re not actually followed up and claimed once the service booking has been updated. So if you’re not sure, it's worth checking your processes to make sure it is being tracked and followed up, and you're not missing out on dollars.
Depending on the size of your business, a little error here and there or little amounts of going over your funding, can really add up if you have quite a number of participants, and if you’re too busy to get on top of it, the problem only compounds.
And unfortunately I have seen a couple of cases of this. It's quite heartbreaking to see these amazing caring service providers sometimes working for next to nothing. Because they're not getting paid what they should and it's not fair.
You deserve to be paid for the amazing work that you do. So if it's something that you're not sure of, or you're avoiding because it's messy and complicated, and you might not want to know how much you haven't been paid. I totally understand. But we can help. Either by outsourcing the catchup work to get back on top of it, we love a good challenge! or we can also help look at ways to improve your processes and tracking methods to fit in with your software and team setup. Or for some clients we have just taken the whole NDIS billing process off their hands, so they can focus on great service and support for their clients.
HOW WE CAN HELP
If you need help with these processes and want better systems in place, or are struggling with some of the frustrations I have mentioned, then firstly, please sign up to receive our free NDIS Claiming Cheat Sheet PDF. It gives you a sneak peek at the key steps we follow to make NDIS admin a breeze.
Then, from there you can either book in a call if you’re keen to just let me and my team take that workload off your shoulders.
