How to to leverage technology to support your staff efficiency as an NDIS provider

As your NDIS business grows, naturally so does the size of your team. You may remember the growing pains of adding support workers to meet your capacity, adding admin staff to manage the day-to-day back end of the business, and adding management team members as the business became more sophisticated.

You might also remember the moment you decided you needed to implement some technology to solve a problem. So what are the problems that providers want to solve?

Pretty much every problem that technology can solve relates to:

• Saving you and your team time

• Saving you, or generating more money for your business

• Improving security and safety

So if you’re a provider that is wondering how money handling technology can help you save time, save money and improve security and safety, this is for you.

Saving time

For providers that don’t use technology to support their money handling processes, it often looks like:

• cashboxes and ledgers or maybe a shared corporate or prepaid card, manual spreadsheet population, storing or scanning physical receipts, and painstaking review of spending to verify it. All of that takes a huge amount of your staffs time, meaning you either need more staff to do the same work, or your current staff spend a significant chunk of their time doing unproductive work

Which leads to money

• For every minute your staff are completing these manual and time consuming tasks, they aren’t about to complete productive, revenue generating activity, which ultimately costs you money, and impacts the time and quality of support you provide to your clients

• If you do manage to maintain your support hour output, it’s usually because you’re hired more resources to keep up with the demand, that costs you more money to deliver the same number of support hours, all because of inefficiencies

Safety and security

• If you’re processes are manual, reliant on hand written or typed input, there is a likelihood that human error will lead to information gaps, and the lack of speed in which this information is collected, reconciled and audited means that any missing information, misused funds or errors are difficult to rectify

• The nature of these processes also means there is very limited transparency and oversight — you’re really just relying on an honesty system to get things 100% right. If something is wrong? The compliance burden, and the financial burden is your problem.

So how can money handling technology actually solve this?

Time

• Technology like SpendAble allows you to pre-configure your spending needs, whether that be a participants budget or financial management plan, or the spending required for business cost centres.

• Your staff can then access money securely in a matter of seconds — and just by tapping their card at purchase, you receive all the information they used to manually record immediately. All they have to do is take a quick photo of the receipt and all of their work is done.

• Your staff then save a ton of time that they can spend doing more of what you hired them to do — support. Meanwhile you don’t need to keep hiring more back office staff to keep things under control, because you’ve got a system that does it all for you at a fraction of the cost

Money

• Real time access to all transaction information, verified by VISA means you reduce the risks of missing or incorrect information significantly. Your spending rules prevent spending that goes against your wishes or the participants spending plan, system checks and flags allow you to identify missing evidence and pin point which staff member needs to provide it. This allows you to get ahead, before the missing info hits your bottom line

• By having enriched information, fast — you have all the information you need for quality and safeguard obligations as well as audit, potentially saving you from big audit costs.

Safety and security

• Real time access to VISA verified, enriched transaction information increases transparency and accountability. No more operating in the dark or with massively delayed and patchy access to information.

• You’re also empowering your participants to be more involved in their spending journey with safe and supported decision making support to help them build their own capacity — and that is something we just can’t put a price on at all

If you’re looking to improve your efficiency, and are an innovative provider that is leveraging technology to do so, chat with us today and we’ll see if we can help you out too.