Time based quantities for NDIS Supports

SupportAbility converts time quantity Support Allocations e.g. 20 minutes, into decimal number quantities (with two precision points) e.g. 0.33 hours as this is the method that the NDIA uses for processing Bulk Payment Requests for the purposes of paying service Providers. 

When entering NDIS Support Allocations within an Activity in SupportAbility, when '20m' i.e. 20 minutes is entered as the quantity, SupportAbility includes that in the Bulk Payment Request as 20 minutes as the Bulk Payment Request file has a column for time. Therefore '0:20' is entered in the Hours column of the Bulk Payment Request file as opposed to 0.33 in the Quantity column. 

The myplace provider portal then converts this 20 minute time quantity to a decimal quantity of 0.33 hours and thus pays the total value of this accordingly.

In light of this, SupportAbility also uses this time to decimal conversion method for invoices for the following key reasons:

  1. so that the value of supports on invoices will match the value of the myplace provider portal calculated remuneration
  2. because most finance systems only work with decimal representations of quantity and not time representations of quantity (this is most likely why the NDIA chose to round decimal quantities to 2 decimal places, so that accurate and consistent prices could be transferred between various systems without being affected by each systems level of quantity decimal precision). 

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