Change is upon us!

On Monday there were some long-awaited changes made to the NDIS portal

These changes caused most NDIS service providers to jump for joy and have allowed CoAbility to make some much needed organisational changes.

As well as unveiling the new updated, bigger and better Provider Finder, Participants and Providers now have more control over their service bookings. They can make the following changes with just a few button clicks:

• Edit or delete service bookings
• Adjust the price, duration and quantity of a service booking
• Instantly cancel a service booking
• Reject changes to a service booking

Previously, changes like these had to be processed by the NDIA. This often caused significant delays in being able to make claims for services delivered or being able to make service bookings after changing providers.

Having to rely on the NDIA to make these simple changes also meant that providers and plan managers had their hands tied when participants wanted to use their funding flexibly. If a Service booking was already in place, there was no spur of the moment changes, that’s for sure.

Happily, this should all be a distant memory if the portal changes work the way they should.

These updates also signal some major organisational changes for CoAbility

When I first founded CoAbility, I envisioned it to be a small provider with maybe a handful of clients. With this in mind, I registered my business as a Sole Trader and happily started providing services.

As CoAbility started to grow to the 200 odd clients that it is today, I quickly realised that I needed to update my business structure and registered as CoAbility Pty Ltd.

This in itself was an easy process. However, changing the business structure with the NDIS and DHHS was not so easy. I basically needed to go through the registration and state approval processes again which took months.

But I can happily report that CoAbility Pty Ltd is now registered with the NDIS and DHHS to provide a number of services including Support Coordination and Specialist Support Coordination.

This combined with the happy portal update means that the admin team at CoAbility will be bustling over the next couple of weeks or so, transferring all client service bookings from the CoAbility portal to the CoAbility Pty Ltd portal.

Being able to end a service booking at this end, rather than having to rely on the NDIA has made this task so much more appealing and user-friendly…I actually can’t wait to get started! (I won’t lie though, I wish I had known about this lovely process when I initially registered my business. I probably would have done things very differently).

So the moral of this story is two-fold

Firstly, God bless the NDIA for finally attempting to make the portal a little more user-friendly, but most importantly think carefully about your business structure before you register. Growth is a beautiful thing, but it can have some costly and time-consuming consequences if your business structure can’t support it.