The compliance obligations pick the shortlist. Start with those, not with the feature grid.

Read this first: we have not implemented against any of these

Every other page in this section of the site tells you which systems we have built against. On this one the answer is none of them. We have implemented against accounting, job management, payments and automation platforms — not against a single NDIS provider management product.

So this page does something different. It sets out the obligations that determine what the software has to do, taken from the Rules themselves and from the NDIA’s own documents, and then lists what each vendor publishes with the gaps marked. The obligations are the durable part; the product landscape changes every year. Where we do have implementation experience — accounting, job management, payments, automation — it is set out in the capability register, gaps and all.

If you want an opinion on which product to buy, this page will not give you one and you should be suspicious of pages that do without disclosing what they have used. What it will give you is a set of questions that a vendor either answers on the first call or does not.

The obligations, from the source

These come from the National Disability Insurance Scheme (Incident Management and Reportable Incidents) Rules 2018 and from the NDIA’s published documents, not from a vendor’s summary of them. They are what your systems have to be able to do, whatever software you buy.

• 24 hours for certain reportable incidents Section 20 of the Rules is headed "Certain reportable incidents must be notified to the Commissioner within 24 hours". Whatever you use has to make a notification possible inside a day, including on a weekend.
• Five business days for the others Section 21: "Other reportable incidents must be notified to the Commissioner within 5 business days". Two clocks, running at once, on different categories.
• Seven years of retention Section 12 requires a record to be "kept for 7 years from the day the record is made", and section 25 requires the same seven years from the day notification was given. Ask any vendor what happens to those records if you stop paying them.
• Bulk claiming is a 5,000-row CSV The NDIA’s own bulk payment request guide describes submitting multiple payment requests in a single uploaded file rather than one at a time, with up to 5,000 rows per file and a filename of at most 20 characters including the extension.
• PACE has published provider APIs The NDIA’s PACE technical documentation for providers lists a Plan API, a Budget API and a Payments API that "submits single or bulk payment requests" — with plan and budget access conditional on participant consent.
• Prices change, and the document has been renamed The current instrument is the NDIS Pricing Schedule 2026-27, version 1.2, published 22 July 2026 and effective 1 July 2026. It replaces what was called the NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits — and several NDIA pages still use the old name.

What six Australian products publish

Published facts only, from each vendor’s own site, fetched on one day. Note particularly the pricing column: these products meter on completely different units, which makes headline prices almost useless to compare without knowing your own shape.

Per user or per client — the unit changes the answer completely

This is the single most useful thing in the table and it is easy to skim past. ShiftCare publishes a per-user price. Brevity publishes a per-client price. SupportAbility brackets by active staff. Those are not variations on a theme; they produce wildly different bills for the same organisation.

A plan management business with four staff and three hundred participants pays for four on a per-user model and three hundred on a per-client one. A supported independent living provider with forty support workers and twelve residents pays the reverse. Neither model is wrong — they are aimed at different businesses, and the vendors are being clear about who they built for.

So do the arithmetic on your own two numbers before you read a single feature list. It will usually remove half the shortlist in five minutes, and it will do it for a reason you can defend to a board.

The questions to ask on the first call

Every one of these comes from the obligations above, and every one has an answer the vendor either has or does not.

• Can we notify a reportable incident inside 24 hours from a phone, on a Sunday? Not "does it have an incident module". The obligation has a clock and the clock does not pause for the weekend.
• Where is the data, physically? Two of the six publish this. It is a fair question and a specific one — a country, not a cloud provider.
• What happens to seven years of records if we leave? Export format, cost, timeframe, and whether the export includes attachments and incident histories rather than just a contact list.
• Do you claim through PRODA or PACE directly, or produce a file we upload? Both are legitimate. They are very different amounts of work per fortnight, and the marketing language for them is nearly identical.
• How fast do you update after a pricing change? The schedule was reissued as version 1.2 in July 2026. Ask what happened in your software the week that landed.
• Which accounting package, specifically? SupportAbility names six including MYOB AccountRight and Xero. Others say "accounting integration". Get the name, and the version.

What we can actually help with, and what we cannot

We cannot recommend an NDIS provider management system, and we would rather say that plainly than dress up desk research as expertise in a sector where the consequences of bad software are not commercial.

What we do is the layer between systems, which in this sector is usually where the double entry is: the same participant details typed into the provider system and again into the rostering tool, a claim file rebuilt by hand every fortnight, incident records that live in three places because no one system holds all of them. That work is the same shape here as it is anywhere, and system glue describes it.

Before any of that, though, the honest advice is the boring one: get the compliance obligations right in the product you buy, and only then look at what is left over. Automating around a system that cannot meet a 24-hour notification obligation is solving the wrong problem expensively, and what not to automate covers more of that ground. How we work sets out what an engagement looks like if you do want the joins dealt with. If you want to talk it through, a Leak Check is free and forty percent of them do not lead to a proposal.

What we have not assessed

All six of the products above, as products. We have read their published material carefully and we have not used any of them, watched a support worker use one, or seen what happens at 4pm on a Friday when a claim fails.

We also left out several products that appear on other lists — CareMaster, Visual Care and others — because we could not read their published pricing reliably enough to quote it. That is a limitation of our research rather than a judgement on them, and it seemed better to say so than to publish a figure we were not sure of.

For the obligations themselves, go to the source rather than to us. The Incident Management and Reportable Incidents Rules are on the Federal Register of Legislation, and the pricing schedule is published by the NDIA. We are not lawyers and this is not compliance advice — check anything here that a decision depends on with the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission or your own adviser.