NDIS bookkeeper Brisbane.
Based right here in Brisbane, our team specialises in NDIS bookkeeping. Registered provider or plan manager, we keep your claiming, payroll and BAS aligned with your mission - so you can focus on participants, not paperwork.
Rated 4.9 from 120+ Google reviews · Registered BAS Agents · Xero Platinum Partner
Bookkeeping that speaks NDIS.
Every NDIS business is unique, so we listen before we build. Then your books run on a system designed for how providers actually get paid.
GST-free supports, coded right
Plan supports are generally GST-free when the requirements are met; the exceptions are where BAS errors breed. Your tax codes are mapped once, correctly.
SCHADS payroll
Loadings, broken shifts, sleepovers and allowances handled properly - with payday super timed to every pay run.
NDIA claiming reconciled
Claims, remittances and participant budgets tracked so income is real and shortfalls surface early.
BAS by registered agents
Lodged on time on agent deadlines, with the GST-free complexity of provider BAS handled as routine.
Budget reporting
Spending visibility aligned with NDIA funding guidelines - see exactly which supports carry the business.
Audit-ready records
Clean books make registration audits cheaper and calmer. Everything reconciled, documented and findable.
What a strong provider file gets right.
Provider files hold together in a small number of predictable ways. Each one is worth having on its own. Together they are what let you say with confidence whether a service line makes money.
Tax codes set per support, not by default
Most supports delivered under a plan are GST-free, so GST-free becomes the default on everything - including the things that are not. Rent, admin fees charged to other businesses, some consumables. A single wrong default repeats across thousands of invoices before anyone checks.
Three payment streams, tracked separately
NDIA-managed, plan-managed and self-managed all pay on different mechanisms and different clocks. Reported as a single receivables number, a genuine collection problem hides behind a stream that was always going to be slow.
SCHADS interpreted and then checked
Broken shifts, sleepovers, 24-hour care, travel between participants, minimum engagement periods. The award is genuinely hard, and payroll software will happily process an interpretation nobody checked. Underpayments surface years later with interest attached.
Services delivered inside the plan budget
The roster runs on. The funding does not. Without burn-down tracked against delivery, the first sign is a rejected claim for work already done and already paid for in wages.
Claims matched to the income they produced
A claim lodged in the portal is not revenue until it is paid, and partial payments are common. Files that treat the portal as the source of truth carry receivables that were never going to arrive.
Records built to stand up in an audit
Registration audits ask you to connect a service, a claim, a payment and a payslip. Where that chain is not reconciled month to month, the audit becomes a reconstruction project charged at consulting rates.
What the first month looks like.
Coding and payroll come first. They carry both the compliance risk and the biggest distortions in your reporting, and everything else is easier once they are right.
- 01
Look at the file
A free health check across your Xero file, your claiming and a sample of pay runs. You get a straight account of where you stand and what it will take, before you commit to anything.
- 02
Fix the coding
Tax codes mapped once and properly, GST-free supports separated from the supplies that are not, so BAS stops being a monthly argument with yourself.
- 03
Prove the payroll
SCHADS interpretation checked against how your people actually work - shifts, sleepovers, travel, allowances - with super timed to each pay run. Anything historically off comes with a plan.
- 04
Reconcile and report
Claims matched to payments, budgets tracked against delivery, BAS lodged on agent deadlines, and a monthly report showing which supports carry the organisation.
What this looks like in practice.
A registered provider delivering support coordination and community access, 48 support workers.
Case study · NDIS providersFunded well, growing fast, and short of cash every fortnight.Claim timing modelled against the payroll cycle, and unbillable time finally measured. See what changed
The background
Three years old and growing on referrals. Participant numbers up every quarter, the service well regarded, and a founder who came from the sector rather than from business.
The challenge
The cash problem was structural, not commercial. Support workers are paid fortnightly under SCHADS, with its own arithmetic of broken shifts, sleepovers, travel between participants and penalty rates - and claims are submitted and paid on a different rhythm entirely. So the business funded its own payroll ahead of its own income, and the faster it grew the wider that gap opened. Underneath it, nobody could say which service lines contributed: support coordination and community access have very different cost structures, and both were reported as one number. Unbillable time - travel, cancellations inside the notice window, admin - was absorbed invisibly.
The approach
Two questions, in order: how much cash does growth consume, and which service lines are worth growing. Answering the second first only accelerates the first.
How the work ran
Weeks 1–4
Model the real cycle, not the intended one
A thirteen-week cash forecast built on actual payroll dates, actual claim submission dates and actual payment timing. The funding gap became a predictable number instead of a fortnightly surprise, and the forecast showed how much working capital each new participant required.
Weeks 5–10
Cost and utilisation per service line
Direct wages, on-costs, travel and unbillable time allocated by service line, with billable utilisation measured per worker. Community access was carrying materially more unbillable travel than anyone had assumed; support coordination was the stronger contributor on far less overhead.
Weeks 11–16
Tighten the claim cycle
Submission moved from weekly-when-someone-got-to-it to a scheduled process with an owner and a reconciliation back to the roster, so unclaimed shifts surfaced within days instead of at month end. Cancellation and travel policies were applied consistently.
What changed
- Cash visibility
- fortnight to fortnight13-week rolling forecast
- Service line reporting
- one blended figureper line, with utilisation
- Unbillable time
- absorbed invisiblymeasured and allocated
- Claim submission
- ad hocscheduled, reconciled to roster
- Cost of growth
- unknownquantified per new participant
Providers rarely struggle because the funding is wrong. They struggle because it arrives on a different schedule from the wages, and because growth quietly consumes cash nobody budgeted for. Registration, audit and plan-management questions sit with specialists; this is the bookkeeping half.
A worked example, built from the pattern these engagements follow in ndis providers. The business is composite and unnamed; the mechanics, the sequence and the order of work are the ones we use. Talk to us about your own numbers.
Frequently asked questions.
Are NDIS supports GST-free in my books?
Most supports delivered under a participant's plan are GST-free when the requirements are met, but not everything a provider invoices qualifies - and mixed coding is the most common error we find in provider files. We set your Xero tax codes up correctly and keep them that way.
Can you handle SCHADS award payroll?
Yes - support-worker payroll with its loadings, broken shifts, sleepovers and allowances is among the hardest in small business, and it is core work for us. Compliant payroll protects both your people and your registration.
Do you reconcile NDIA claiming?
Yes. Claims lodged, payments received and participant budgets tracked so your receivables are real - not a hopeful number in a portal.
Do you work with plan managers?
Yes - plan management businesses have their own bookkeeping shape (client-money handling, volume invoicing) and we support several.
Our participants are a mix of plan-managed, self-managed and NDIA-managed. Can you track that?
Yes, and they need to be tracked separately, because the three get paid in completely different ways. NDIA-managed goes through the provider portal. Plan-managed means invoicing a plan manager whose payment terms are their own. Self-managed means invoicing the participant or their family directly. Pooled into one receivables figure, an ageing report tells you nothing - split out, you can see which stream is actually slow.
What happens when a participant's budget runs out mid-month?
You deliver support you cannot claim. It is the most common way a provider loses real money without noticing, because the roster keeps running while the funding does not. We track budget burn-down against services delivered so the shortfall shows up before the shift is worked, not after the claim is rejected.
The price limits change every July. Does that affect our books?
It affects what you can claim, so it affects what you should be invoicing. When the NDIS pricing arrangements update, rates in your billing need to move with them - invoicing above a price limit is simply not claimable, and invoicing below it is money left behind. We check your rates against the current arrangements as part of the annual rollover.
We have a registration audit coming up. Will our books hold up?
That depends on where they are now, and we will give you a straight answer up front rather than a comfortable one. Clean, reconciled records with claims matched to services delivered, and payroll that demonstrably meets SCHADS, is what makes an audit quick and unremarkable. Getting there ahead of time is the whole job, and it is very achievable.
What does NDIS bookkeeping cost?
A fixed fee matched to your claim volume, payroll size and reporting needs - agreed up front. Use the fee estimator for an indicative range.
Ready to simplify your NDIS bookkeeping?
Call 07 3899 8311 or book a free consultation - and get back to the care work that matters.