Lumary DC - This article explains how to manage and bill NDIS clients on a program of support. It includes links to several guides across both the Lumary DC and Lumary WFM help centers which together describe the steps involved.
Programs of support are billed regularly for an agreed period. They support clients to achieve goals in a group setting.
What are programs of support?
Programs of support
A provider of group-based supports in the following categories can enter into an agreement with the participant called a program of supports:
- Assistance in Shared Living Arrangements - Supported Independent Living section
of the Assistance with Daily Living support category - Assistance with Social, Economic and Community Participation support
category, including supports in employment, or - Any of the capacity building support categories.
Under this approach, providers can claim against a client's plan for all agreed supports, whether the client attended or not, as long as the provider had the capacity to deliver the instance of support. Supports delivered as part of a ‘Program of Support’ are not subject to the short notice cancellation rules.
Providers can claim agreed programs of support against the related support items, using the typical pattern of support to determine the frequency of support within a defined time period, usually a week, which is then claimed as a multiplier of the unit price. This typical pattern of support, when recorded and agreed with a participant, forms the basis of the service agreement and the program of support between the provider and participant. The agreed program of support enables the provider to claim a regular weekly amount for delivering supports during a specified period, for no longer than 6 months.
Required packages
Available with: Lumary DC 2.7 and later
Updated in: Lumary DC 2.8
This article describes how programs of support can be used to bill for:
Programs of support for SIL
To bill supported independent living (SIL) services as a program of supports, the only change you would make from the standard process, is to tick the Program of Support checkbox on the service agreement. The rest of the setup for a service agreement with automated billing is the same as for standard NDIS agreements.
Read how to create an NDIS service agreement
Programs of support for group activities
For group activities offered under a program of supports, there is functionality to help you:
- roster and track attendance for group members, which ensures compliance with the unplanned exit rules,
- handle different billing arrangements for public holidays and planned closure periods, and
- schedule billing for group services including transport and centre capital costs.
To run a group program as a program of support, you first need a Site record. The Site record in Lumary doesn’t just represent a site or location. It is also a master record for defining:
- which services are available to be added to service agreements,
- which public holiday and closure period calendars to apply when billing or scheduling services,
- which accounting cost codes to apply to worker pay transactions,
- lists of associated clients or workers,
- and much more
Follow these guides to prepare your Site record ready to create service agreements for each client:
- Create a Site
- Create a Public Holiday Calendar and link it to the Site
- Repeat the above process to create a Closure Period Calendar and link it to the Site
- Link Services to the Site
Along with setting up your site, calendars, and services you need to create a Group Program record for each group. A Group Program has a set of clients or Group Members who are rostered to attend sessions with the group. The group program record is required to enable automated billing from the client's service agreement. Because billing is automated via the service agreement, group member planned services are not required unless there are additional services such as an activity fee which is not auto-billed from the agreement.
Clients can either be billed via planned services, or have a Program of Support (POS) Service Agreement to bill for the group sessions they will attend under the program. Services added to a POS agreement can be set to auto-bill for the duration of the program and under the Program of Support billing arrangement, the client is billed whether or not they attend, provided they don't consistently miss their sessions week after week.
When creating the NDIS service agreement, there are a couple of extra steps:
- Tick the Program of Support checkbox on the service agreement
- For each Service Agreement Item, select the related Group Program and enable Auto-generate Service Delivered Records
- To bill for centre capital costs (CCC) related to the primary service, ensure the service agreement and the service agreement item service allow CCC. There is no need to create a CCC service agreement item, as with auto-billing enabled the CCC service delivered record will be generated automatically, and explicitly listing it on the agreement would generate duplicates.
- Ensure the start date and end date of each item matches the period the group program will run and during which the client should be billed.
- Set up a program of support service agreement for each client
- Follow the usual steps to add a category
- Add service agreement items, at the required delivery ratio, tick the 'Auto-generate service delivered records' option and link the Group Program
- Generate a quote and record client approval to transition the agreement from draft to current.
When each of the group members has been set up following the above steps, sessions can be rostered. Setting up the group and group members first, serves as a template for client appointments to be automatically rostered to each session for each member.
The group program page provides a Member Details tab which consolidates client risks and support needs for all members, making it easier to assess the support needs for each session.
The steps below assume the program will run across more than one roster period, and therefore cover adding sessions to a base roster as a template for publishing multiple roster periods over the duration of the program.
On the base roster sessions, clients can be removed from sessions on days they are not scheduled to attend. This will ensure that client appointments are only created for the days they are attending. From each client's Group Member page, you can view their attendance pattern on the Schedule list and their rostered and upcoming sessions on the Sessions list. For clients whose attendance pattern is irregular or does not align with the base roster period, they should be removed from all base roster sessions to enable ad hoc scheduling manually on the roster period or live roster. Group members cannot be unscheduled on the live roster.
- Create a base roster for the site and add group sessions
- Create, validate, and publish a roster period
Once your group program is up and running, see how to: