Plan Management NDIS Bulk Payment Requests
This article provides detailed information relating to the process of generating a Plan Management NDIS Bulk Payment Request.
Audience: Authorised Representatives, Finance Team
Summary
The following list summarises the content within this article. Click on the links below to take you to the relevant sections:
Prerequisites
- The configuration outlined in the Steps to set up and use the NDIS Financial Plan Management (FPM) functionality article linked below must be completed, in order to export invoices to your finance system where required and generate NDIS Bulk Payment Requests.
- NDIS Plan Managed Client Funding records must be entered in the Client's FPM tab for Providers of Plan Management Services.
- NDIS Support Allocations applied within the External Invoice Items entered, and
- External Invoices must also have the Sign Off performed prior to being available to include in an External Invoice Batch and the subsequent NDIS Bulk Payment Request.
- External Invoice batches will need to be generated, prior to them being available for inclusion in the NDIS Bulk Payment Request file.
- To access the 'Finance' menu and generate a 'Plan Management Bulk Payment Request', Staff require the 'View Financial Information' and 'Edit Client Records Across ALL Services' Staff Account Privileges.
External Invoice Batches must be generated first
Before a Plan Management NDIS Bulk Payment Request can be generated, External Invoice Batches must be generated first. Please review the following article for an overview of this process, linked at the end of this article for reference:
- Generating an External [Plan Managed] Invoice Batch
How to generate a Plan Management Bulk Payment Request
To generate a Plan Management Bulk Payment Request select 'Finance' from the Dashboard:
Navigate to the 'Plan Management::Bulk Payment Requests (BPRs)' section of the Finance menu and select '+ Generate Plan Management BPR':
Step 1: Search for External Invoices
Enter the search criteria for the External Invoices that you wish to include in the NDIS Bulk Payment Request:
National or State
When generating a Plan Management NDIS Bulk Payment Request, your organisation can specify which Supports to include, i.e. those associated with Clients who reside in a specific State or Territory, e.g. VIC:
Or to include all Supports regardless of this by selecting 'National'.
N.B. The available options to select from here depend on how your organisation's Provider Number has been configured in System Preferences. In order to select 'National', your organisation's Provider Registration Number must be configured in this field. Please see the 'NDIS Provider Registration Number ' section of the Steps to set up and use the NDIS Financial Plan Management (FPM) functionality article linked below, for more information.
Invoice Date
Select the Invoice Dates that you wish to include, where relevant. This date range is generally left empty to include all Invoices:
Search
Select 'Search for Invoices' to continue:
Step 2: Choose the invoices to include
The available Invoices to include are displayed for selection.
Select the relevant Invoices to include by ticking the 'Add to Batch' check boxes individually or the green 'All' button at the top, then navigate to the bottom of the screen and select 'Generate NDIS Bulk Payment Request' to create this:
N.B. A maximum of 5005 Invoice Items may be included in each Plan Management NDIS Bulk Payment Request.
N.B. The Plan Management BPR displays the ABN of Service Providers as configured in the corresponding field in the NDIS Service Provider Contact record, provided a valid ABN has been entered e.g. Helping Hand.
A confirmation window will appear including the number of selected invoices:
Select 'Generate NDIS Bulk Payment Request' to complete this process.
Why aren't all available External Invoices appearing in the search results?
If some External Invoices are not appearing in the search results, it may be due to a discrepancy between the State listed in the address listed in the Details section Client record and the State listed in the Settings section of the related Client Funding record.
This may occur when a Client lives in one state, but travels over the state border to access services from a service provider in another state.
For example, if the Client lives in Albury, NSW:
However, they cross the state border to have services delivered in Wodonga, VIC:
In this scenario, selecting VIC in the 'National or State' field when Searching for External Invoices will result in these External invoices not appearing in the search results as the Client lives in NSW.
To prevent this from happening, simply move the Provider NDIS Registration Number to the 'NATIONAL' field in NDIS section of the Settings tab in System Preferences:
Then ensure that 'NATIONAL' is selected on the 'Generate Plan Management BPR:' screen.
The External Invoices for a Client that lives in a different State to where the Services were delivered will now appear in the search results.
Step 3: Payment Request generation complete
Once generated, a summary of the Invoice Items included is displayed:
Download Plan Management BPR
The required CSV file export may then be downloaded from the 'Actions' menu by selecting 'Download Plan Management BPR':
Selecting this will download the Plan Management BPR file CSV export to your computer's local hard drive, or wherever you have set downloads to save:
The Plan Management BPR file CSV export is formatted to the NDIA's specific requirements. This includes the requirement to list the ABN of Service Providers, provided a valid ABN has been entered in the corresponding field in the NDIS Service Provider Contact record.
Naming Convention of the File
The naming convention of the Plan Management BPR CSV file is structured as follows:
bprExt<bprID><provider-domain-prefix>.csv e.g bprExt4providername.csv
This ensures each file is unique to every provider to prevent errors being encountered when attempting to upload the BPR to the portal due to a file of that name already existing.
The 'Ext' reference differentiates this from the Direct BPR which does not include this reference.
The Provider's name used in the naming convention is the domain prefix from a provider’s SupportAbility installation URL that comes before '.supportability.com.au'.
N.B. Providers who have since changed their organisation name and this is not reflected in their current SupportAbility domain name may wish to review the Change of SupportAbility Installation Domain Name article linked below for your reference.
Previewing the File
There should be no need to open this CSV as all of the checks and balances should ideally have been completed prior to this step. The reason we recommend not doing this is opening this file in Microsoft Excel, for example, can sometimes result in this data being changed inadvertently from the required format upon saving.
If this is required we recommend following the instructions to do this safely as outlined in the How to open CSV files safely in Microsoft Excel article linked below.
How are Supports with an Hours Unit of Measure included?
Regardless of how the time is entered when allocating Supports in External Invoice Items, Support Allocations with UoM = Hours are listed in the in decimal format in the 'Quantity' column of the NDIS Bulk Payment Request file exports.
How is the Claim Reference formatted?
This granular level of identification allows providers to more easily identify any specific Invoice Item/s if errors have occurred.
For more information about how to configure the SupportAbility External Invoice Number, please review the External Invoice Number Formatting section of the Steps to set up and use the NDIS Financial Plan Management (FPM) functionality article linked below for reference.
Submit the Bulk Payment Request
Once downloaded, the NDIS Bulk Payment Request (BPR) is then available to submit to the myplace provider portal manually.
We recommend using the myplace provider portal step by step guides to assist you with How to submit Bulk Payment Requests.
Reconciliation
Each 'Plan Management BPR' which has been generated remains available to view in the Finance menu:
These batches are useful for reconciling against the remittance advice received from the NDIA. Selecting the target icon of an individual Batch will open it to display the External Invoices which were included:
