How to Choose NDIS Software: A Buyer's Checklist

Most NDIS software looks broadly similar in a demo. Every product has a scheduler, participant records, notes and invoicing, and every demo is run on clean sample data by someone who knows exactly where to click. The differences that matter appear at the edges — in award interpretation, in what happens when a claim fails, in whether travel survives the trip to the invoice.

This is a checklist of questions to ask. It is written to be used against any vendor, including us.

Judge NDIS software on your own scenarios, not a demo dataset

This is the single highest-value thing you can do, and it costs a vendor nothing to agree to if the product works.

Bring three real situations, anonymised: a participant with a complicated funding arrangement, a worker whose last fortnight involved a broken shift and a sleepover, and a claim that failed recently. Ask to see the system handle those three. Sample data is chosen to flatter a product; your data is not.

Award interpretation

• Is SCHADS interpreted on every plan, or is it an upgrade?
• Does it calculate from approved actual times or from the roster? (If the roster, it is wrong every time a shift runs over.)
• Broken shift with two unpaid breaks — is the higher allowance applied automatically?
• A sleepover with a 40-minute disturbance — is the disturbed time paid on top of the allowance?
• Casual on a Sunday — show the working, not the total.
• Contractors: paid at flat rates without award interpretation, while the client is still charged from the price book?

Claiming

• Is the current NDIS Support Catalogue loaded, and how does it get updated when the price guide changes?
• Is a line validated against the price limit when the invoice is raised, or only when the claim is built?
• Does it check remaining funds in the correct budget category?
• When a claim comes back, are results stored per line or as a batch summary?
• Can a payment be reconciled by hand when the remittance file cannot be read? (It will happen.)

Travel

• Where does a worker record kilometres, and how many taps is it?
• Do those kilometres flow onto the timesheet and get approved with it?
• Do they become an invoice line under the right support item, automatically?
• Are provider travel time and vehicle kilometres handled as the separate things the scheme says they are?

Follow one worker's day from roster to invoice in the demo. Travel usually falls out somewhere in the middle, and you want to see where.

Compliance and evidence

• Are worker screening and qualification expiries tracked, and do they block rostering when lapsed, or just warn?
• Can you produce an incident register, a training record and a service agreement list for an audit without exporting to a spreadsheet first?
• Are progress note edits visible, or silent?
• Is clock-in location captured, and what happens on a weak GPS fix? (A geofence that blocks clock-in teaches workers to work around it.)

Data isolation — ask this one directly

You hold health information about people with disability. Ask:

• How is one provider's data separated from another's — in application code, or at the database?
• Can the vendor's own staff read your participant data? Is impersonation possible?
• Where is the data hosted?
• Are backups encrypted, and has a restore actually been tested?

"In application code" means a single query written incorrectly can cross the boundary. Enforcement at the database level means it cannot, regardless of what the application asks for.

Getting in, and getting out

• What does migration involve, and who does it? Can an import be dry-run and reversed?
• What is the realistic time to running — days, or a quarter?
• If you leave, what do you get back, in what format, and how quickly?

The exit question is worth asking early. A vendor who answers it comfortably is telling you something about how they intend to keep you.

Commercials

• Per participant, per user, or flat? (Per user penalises you for hiring.)
• What happens at the participant limit — a price step, or a per-participant increment?
• Which modules are extra, and are any of them things you assumed were included?
• Is there a lock-in contract?
• Implementation and training — included or quoted?

The shortest version

If you only ask three things, ask these:

1. Show me SCHADS calculated from a shift that ran 50 minutes over its roster.
2. Show me a claim line failing, and show me where that failure is recorded.
3. Show me a worker's kilometres becoming an invoice line.

Those three cover the places NDIS software usually breaks, and they cannot be answered with a slide.