FAQs

NDIS

Does SupportAbility manage NDIS Plan Budgets?

Yes. SupportAbility has comprehensive tools for establishing, tracking, managing and reporting on client budgets.

SupportAbility provides tools for managing Plan Reviews and for placing clients on Billing Hold. Budget warnings are raised when planning service delivery and holistic budget utilisation can be generated to understand the status of all clients’ budgets.

How are NDIS Pricing Arrangements (Price Guide) updates managed?

The National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) release periodic updates to the NDIS Price Arrangements (previously called Price Guides).

Whenever an update to these Pricing Arrangements occurs, it is our highest priority to include this updated information in SupportAbility so that our providers can continue to provide the supports they deliver.

Does SupportAbility support the NDIS Remote and Very Remote Pricing Arrangements (Price Guides)?

The Remote and Very Remote Pricing Arrangements (Price Guides) are not available in SupportAbility.

To accommodate the need for higher prices, providers of direct services have the option to create a custom price when adding NDIS Support Items to a Participants funding record. This option may be feasible if you only support a handful of participants in a remote or very remote capacity.

However, if the majority of your participants require the use of the Remote and Very Remote Pricing Arrangements (Price Guides), this customisation would not be suitable.

Governance

Does SupportAbility provide special privacy barriers for NDIS Intermediary Services such as Support Coordination and Plan Management?

Yes. SupportAbility applies privacy barriers around case notes so that Direct Services cannot see the case notes recorded by intermediary services, such as Support Coordination and Plan Management, and vice versa.

Who owns the data that our organisation enters into SupportAbility?

As a SupportAbility subscriber, your organisation retains full ownership rights over all data entered into SupportAbility, including any uploaded documents.

Where is the data stored?

All data is stored in AWS data centres, located in New South Wales, Australia.

How is my data protected?

We understand that access to your client data is critical for your organisation and that without it, business effectively grinds to a halt. In order to ensure excellent performance and a highly reliable service for our clients, the SupportAbility data centre maintains multiple Tier-1 internet connections with failover procedures.

Government grade security safeguards and backup procedures have been implemented to protect your data at all times.

What are the SupportAbility Terms of Service?

The SupportAbility Terms of Service are available on request.

How can SupportAbility be used to assist with Audits?

SupportAbility is designed to make audits quick and painless. SupportAbility stores detailed event and data change logs on all Staff activity as they use the system. We have functionality, and strategies to assist, to ensure there are clear evidence trails.

Can I get a referral from one of your clients?

Absolutely! Once we understand more about your organisation and the services you deliver following a product demonstration, we can provide you with contact details for one of our subscribing providers that has similar operations and business requirements.

Does SupportAbility contain an Incident Management System?

Yes, SupportAbility provides a suite of tools for managing client behavioural incidents and provides an accident incident register to assess risk (ISO31000), track injuries, perform investigations to identify contributing factors, collect documentation and identify opportunities for improvement.

Does SupportAbility support and promote the use of the NDIS Practice Standards?

Yes. All of the NDIS Practice Standards from the NDIS Quality and Safeguarding Framework are available in SupportAbility and can be attached to many different records in SupportAbility to assist auditing outcomes.

Can staff have different levels of access?

Yes. SupportAbility can be used to provision tailored privileges for staff. Privileges can be provisioned for each site and service were a staff member works, or globally, across the organisation as a whole.

Is my data backed up?

Yes. Each night, a backup snapshot is taken of your SupportAbility installation and is moved to a geographically separate server, also located in Australia. Once it arrives at the backup server, the backup is decompressed, launched and tested to ensure that the backup is viable and able to be used in the event of an emergency, as part of our Disaster Recovery Plan. Each nightly backup is stored 30 days before being securely deleted.

How are planned and unplanned outages communicated and managed?

Periodically, scheduled maintenance is required to maintain the SupportAbility product where the service will be offline for a specific timeframe and planned outages may be required in the case of a system upgrade. On occasion, unplanned outages may occur for which regular status updates are provided in the SupportAbility Scheduled Maintenance and Outage Register page in our Knowledge Base.

How many NDIS Service Providers rely on SupportAbility to manage their NDIS clients and services?

Over 100 NDIS service providers rely on SupportAbility to support and enhance their operational quality and efficiency gains whilst supporting compliance. Our providers are spread across every state and deliver the full gamut of services offered under the NDIS.

Can I use SupportAbility to track and manage staff documentation such as Worker Screening Checks?

Yes. A list of mandatory document requirements can be configured for each service your organisation delivers for both clients that participate in and staff that work in those services.

For example, an accommodation service may require that all clients must have an NDIS plan and a service agreement document attached to their record and all staff must have an NDIS Worker Screening Check in place.

SupportAbility will display warnings on client and staff records if mandatory documents are not in place. Furthermore, reports can be generated to identify all missing mandatory client and staff documents across the entire organisation to identify gaps in documentation and ensure compliance.

Subscriptions

How do subscriptions and pricing work?

Subscription brackets are based on the number of active staff required. An active staff member is anyone who needs to log in to SupportAbility. This may be for creating case notes, signing off on timesheets, or generating invoices. We do not charge different rates for ‘admin’ staff. Create unlimited client records with each subscription. In addition the the above, your subscription includes access all new features including comprehensive release notes when updates occur. Take advantage of our industry knowledge when changes are required to the Pricing Arrangements (Price Guides).

What is the minimum contract period?

All SupportAbility subscriptions are annual and are paid for at the start of each subscription year.

How much document storage is included with each subscription?

Unlimited document storage is available to help you manage documents for client, staff and organisational policies and procedures with unlimited storage. Upload documents, then apply privacy and expiry notifications as required.

Can we reduce our subscription fees if we re not planning on using all available features?

Each SupportAbility subscription includes all features and modules included in the product. Unfortunately, subscription fees can not be reduced if your organisation chooses to only use a portion of what is available. The only services that are not included in the above, and may incur additional fees are:

Onboarding & Support

Does each subscription include implementation support?

Each SupportAbility subscription includes strategic guidance and support, from our Customer Success team throughout your implementation and beyond. Training is provided through our library of on-demand videos built into SupportAbility. These videos, as well as the strategic and ‘How-to’ information located in the SupportAbility Knowledge Base, are designed to help you get the most value from your subscription. Our Customer Success team are committed to supporting our providers at each stage of the implementation project.

How do my staff receive training?

SupportAbility has a host of on-demand training videos available in its in-built Learning Centre, along with help articles accessible via our ever-growing Knowledge Base allowing Staff the flexibility to learn in their preferred learning style and at their own pace. Staff can access these resources to engage in self-paced learning and can revise the material whenever they need it. We find that this self-paced and on-demand learning environment, in combination with an internal discussion around your organisation’s processes, is what Staff require to understand SupportAbility and become proficient in its use.

Can we import data from our existing system into SupportAbility?

It is important to note that SupportAbility does not provide a service to import data from your existing system. SupportAbility has an incredibly sophisticated data structure designed specifically to manage NDIS client data in the cloud. Other systems have different structures to meet their own purposes. Trying to force data from one into another generally results in a loss in the quality of information during implementation. Our job here at SupportAbility is to ensure that your implementation is a resounding success and that you are using best practices right from the start which is why we don’t offer importation services. We employ tried and tested data entry approaches that consistently achieve better results. Ask us for more details.

Do you provide staging environments to train staff?

Need to train your staff to use SupportAbility in a sandbox environment that is an exact replica of your live SupportAbility? SupportAbility Training Installations are available as an additional subscription option. Training Installations are an identical copy of your live SupportAbility installation. Each night, we replace your training installation and all its data with a copy of your live SupportAbility system. This means that any changes made within the training environment are overwritten each night to start fresh again each day and the data in the training site will never be more than 24 hours older than your live site.

Our workforce is highly casualised. Can this reduce our subscription fee?

SupportAbilities pricing is already based on the assumption that the great majority of NDIS service providers have a highly casualised workforce. This allows us to provide simple and consistent pricing for all staff, regardless of their role and responsibilities.

What are standard hours for providing Support?

Support is available between 9:00 am to 5:00 pm Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney, Monday to Friday.

Do you provide a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for support?

We do not provide SLA’s on support response times however, we triage and prioritise all incoming support requests and responses are usually provided in a timely manner based on the priority of the query. We can however provide customer support happiness reports based on real feedback from our subscribers.

Where are your support staff based?

All of our Customer Success team reside within Australia, with most in Melbourne and one team member based on the Gold Coast.

How do we access support?

We are here to support you. Unlimited email support is included as part of your SupportAbility subscription. Each subscribing organisation appoints up to two Authorised Representatives to act as their dedicated spokespersons and represent their organisation in all matters. First-tier support is provided by each organisation’s Authorised Representatives. If an Authorised Representative is unable to resolve a user request, they escalate the issue/enquiry on behalf of the Staff Member via email to our Customer Success Team.

Integrations & Development

Does SupportAbility integrate with the MyPlace Provider Portal?

Yes! SupportAbility provides flat file exports (CSV) for integration with the myplace provider portal.

Upload the results of each bulk claim to provide the perfect feedback loop and ensure a true representation of participant data between your finance system, the myplace provider portal and SupportAbility.

Can we integrate SupportAbility with our existing financial, payroll and other internal systems?

Yes! SupportAbility is designed to export accounts receivable invoice data across to your organisation’s finance system, which is then responsible for distributing those invoices to debtors and for managing the accounts receivable process.

We can also export time and attendance data (time sheets) for your payroll system, which is then responsible for award interpretation and payroll generation.

SupportAbility provides a large number of “out-of-the-box” finance and payroll integrations that are included with every subscription. Custom finance and payroll integrations can be built for additional systems upon request. Custom integrations do incur additional charges.

Does SupportAbility support TAC, Aged Care and other government funded initiatives?

Whist we have several subscribing NDIS service providers that utilise SupportAbility to deliver a portion of non-NDIS funded services such as TAC and Aged Care, this is not the core focus of SupportAbility. SupportAbility can generate invoices for these non-NDIS services, and even manage basic budgets and expenditure, however, we do not integrate with any non-NDIS government portals such as DEX or the My Aged Care service provider portal.

Which Finance Systems do you integrate with?

SupportAbility is designed to export invoice data across to your organisation’s finance system. Your finance system will be responsible for distributing those invoices and managing the accounts receivable process.

Integrations are available, at no extra cost, for the following finance systems:

MYOB AccountRight v19
MYOB AccountRight 2020
Xero
QuickBooks/Reckon via Zed Axis (N.B. the hosted and online versions of these products is not supported)
Sage Evolution
Tencia

Which Payroll Systems do you integrate with?

SupportAbility can export timesheet data across to your nominated payroll system. Your payroll system will be responsible for award interpretation on that timesheet data and processing the payroll.

Integrations are available, at no extra cost, for the following payroll systems:

MYOB AccountRight
HR3
Payroll Metrics
Sage MicrOpay

Can I engage SupportAbility to undertake custom development?

The only custom development service we provide is building custom finance and payroll integrations.

SupportAbility is not customised for individual service providers but instead uses a community development model. The Australian Disability and Mental Health industry is an incredibly diverse ecosystem of service providers with many distinctly different services and ways of operating. As a result, even though feature requests may seem imperative to an individual service provider, we are tasked with designing a system that meets the core needs of our large and growing subscriber base, whilst staying true to SupportAbility’s core value of providing a simple user experience.

Can I attach a Business Intelligence tool such as Power BI or Tableau to my SupportAbility SQL data?

Yes. Many larger organisations require direct access to their raw SupportAbility data for the following reasons:

the need to create custom reports using a business intelligence tool such as Tableau or Power BI
dashboarding
data warehousing purposes
data mining and data analytics purposes

To help organisations meet these requirements, we offer annual Data Replica subscriptions to access a MySQL slave replica of your SupportAbility installation data.

SupportAbility Cloud Platform

Why are cloud-based systems superior to systems hosted internally?

The benefits of cloud based solutions include:

Reducing:

the total cost of ownership (TCO) of software
the need for expensive in-house IT staff and expertise
system downtime

Whilst increasing:

service availability
service stability
security
system capacity
service scalability
quality
mobility
speed of updates

What web browsers do you support?

For the best results, we recommend using the Google Chrome web browser when accessing SupportAbility.

SupportAbility also supports recent versions of the following major web browsers:

Google Chrome 71+ (Highly recommended for all SupportAbility users)
Firefox 18+
Microsoft Edge – 18+
Safari 12+
Safari (for iOS on iPad) – Latest version

What operating systems do you support?

SupportAbility is operating system agnostic and supports all operating systems. It is however important to ensure that a supported web browser is used.

Do you support mobile phones and tablets?

The SupportAbility web application can be used on tablet devices and mobile phones via most browsers. The specialised mobile application provides access to core functions required by support workers in the field.

Does SupportAbility have a Client Portal?

SupportAbility does not include Client Portal functionality for NDIS participants and their families to log in and access or submit information.

How often are updates applied and managed?

SupportAbility’s Engineering Team follow the agile methodology and release upgrades for the product generally every 3-4 weeks. This means we’re able to respond to changes in the NDIS as well as increase the value and meet the needs of our diverse subscriber base.

The great majority of upgrades are applied after hours and will not affect users even if they are using SupportAbility at the time. These minor upgrades and the changes within them are announced at the time of release. For major upgrades, we communicate, often multiple times, in advance, to help providers plan and prepare.

Whenever a new version of SupportAbility is released, we inform the nominated SupportAbility Authorised Representatives for each subscriber of all the changes we’ve made via our Release Notes. These Release Notes also provide links to new or updated documentation to assist providers in taking advantage of new features and enhancements.