What do the NDIS Quality & Safeguard standards say about handling participant money?

Quality and Safeguard standard 4 is pretty explicit:

If you need to handle the personal money of a participant, you need to account for it, protect it, use it in line with the participants wishes and support the participant to access it where possible.

As a provider, you have to make a choice — do you pull together a band-aid solution that barely ticks the boxes, or do you go over an above you support the outcomes and independence of your participants.

Now obviously the overwhelming majority of providers intend to do the latter — however what they often don’t realise is that they don’t necessarily have the best solution in place to achieve their goals. It might just be because you don’t actually know your options…

Let’s break it down:

Accounting for the money:

• You need to record what was spent, what for, who spent it & when

• You can either do that extremely manually, or you can use a piece of technology that can automate and simplify that

Protecting the money:

• You can store it in a cashbox or use a business expense tool to keep it safe — but that restricts a participant from accessing their money. If the participant has to ask permission to access their own money, that isn’t empowerment, choice and control — that’s restriction.

• You can either do it that way, or you can use a system that brings participants, providers and allies all into one system cohesively

Using it in line with participant goals:

• You can set a spending plan and hope your staff follow it, but be accountable for the overspend if the plan isn’t followed

• Or you can use a system that can program the participants spending and holds everyone accountable to using it accordingly

Support participant to access:

• You can give the participant money after they ask for it, creating a time delay between wanting to use their money and actually being able to

• Or you can use a system that provides participants with supported decision making features to improve their own financial capacity, and eventually have them rely less on carers to handle their money for them

In the end, it’s really about what’s important to you. We built SpendAble because personal finance products don’t empower participants, and business finance products don’t account for them at all. We think participants deserve better, don’t you?