The NDIS Money You Are Leaving on the Table

The revenue most NDIS providers lose is not lost to fraud or to bad debts. It is lost to supports that were delivered and never claimed, claimed against the wrong item, or claimed and then part paid with nobody following up.

NDIS bookkeeping fails in ways ordinary bookkeeping does not, because your revenue is not created by issuing an invoice. It is created by lodging a payment request that has to match a service that actually happened, against a support item that actually fits. Three things that can each be wrong independently.

The reconciliation almost nobody runs

Most providers reconcile their bank account. Very few reconcile the chain that produces the money in it.

There are three separate records and they drift apart quietly:

1. The support delivered, sitting in your rostering or client management system
2. The payment request lodged, sitting in the portal
3. The payment received, sitting in your bank and on the remittance

Reconciling two and three tells you that what you claimed got paid. It tells you nothing about what you delivered and never claimed, which is where the money actually goes. That gap between one and two is invisible on every report a standard bookkeeping setup produces, and for a provider running a few hundred supports a month it is rarely zero.

Run it at participant level, monthly. Every support delivered, matched to a claim, matched to a payment. Anything in the first column without a partner in the second is revenue you have earned and given away.

Claiming against the wrong support item

Providers are responsible for ensuring claims accurately reflect the supports delivered, including the frequency, volume and type, and each claim has to be made against the specific support item that aligns to the service delivered.

In practice this goes wrong in ordinary ways. A support gets claimed against the item someone used last time rather than the one that fits this service. A staff member picks a familiar code because the catalogue is long. An item that was correct before a catalogue update stops being correct and nobody notices.

Both directions cost you. Claiming under a lower priced item leaves money behind. Claiming under the wrong item at all is a compliance problem that surfaces later, with interest.

The claim types people forget

The Support Catalogue sets out which claim types apply to each price limited item, and two of them are routinely left unclaimed because they do not feel like billable work.

• Provider travel. Where the item allows it and the conditions are met, travel to a participant is claimable. For community based supports this is a material part of the day and it is the single most commonly forgotten claim we see.
• Non-face-to-face supports. Work done for a participant that is not delivered in their presence, again where the item permits it.

Neither is automatic and neither applies to every item, which is exactly why they get skipped. Check the catalogue entry for the items you use most and build the allowable claim types into your process rather than leaving them to the judgement of whoever is doing the claiming that week.

Rejected and part paid claims that nobody chases

A payment request can be rejected, or paid at less than claimed, and the notification is easy to miss when a few hundred go through each month.

Without a deliberate process, these accumulate. Money you are entitled to sits unclaimed past the point where anyone remembers the circumstances, and by then reconstructing what happened costs more than the claim is worth.

The fix is a fortnightly exception report. Not every claim, only the ones that did not pay in full. It takes minutes and it is the highest return half hour in NDIS administration.

Support worker payroll, where the margin actually goes

Your pricing is largely set for you. Your labour cost is not, and it is where NDIS providers most often discover that a service they deliver constantly is not profitable.

Support work is shift based, frequently across evenings, weekends and public holidays, with penalties, allowances, broken shifts, sleepovers and travel time all governed by the award. The result is a real hourly cost that moves depending on when the shift falls, against revenue that largely does not.

Two shifts at the same price limit can have materially different labour costs. If you are not costing supports at the actual award cost of the person delivering them, at the time they deliver them, you do not know which of your services make money. Use the Fair Work pay tools to confirm the rates rather than working from what payroll has always done.

Since 1 July 2026 there is a cash timing dimension as well. Superannuation must now be received by the fund within 7 business days of payday rather than quarterly, so a workforce paid fortnightly no longer provides the super float that many providers were unknowingly relying on for working capital.

What to run every month

1. Supports delivered against claims lodged, at participant level. The gap is unclaimed revenue.
2. Claims lodged against payments received, with every rejection and part payment listed separately for follow up.
3. Your most used support items checked against the current catalogue, including allowable claim types and current price limits.
4. Margin by service type, using real award cost of the staff who delivered it, not an average hourly rate.

Price limits and the Support Catalogue are updated periodically, so the version you set your pricing against may no longer be current. Check the NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits directly rather than relying on a figure someone entered into your system a year ago.

See NDIS bookkeeping for how we run this, or awards and timesheets if support worker costing is the part that is unclear. Superannuation rules referenced here apply for the 2026-27 financial year.