My Plan Manager’s client portal: take control of your NDIS spending

Life as a National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) participant can be a hectic juggle at the best of times – a highwire act that sees you balancing time to access much-needed supports alongside the seemingly endless hours of administration associated with paying those who provide them.

At My Plan Manager, we have a really handy piece of tech that takes some of the paperwork pain away and puts you in control of your dollars – and your days!

With a simple, passwordless log in, you (and all our clients) can use our client portal to:

• get an overview of your NDIS funding and the categories within it
• see what you’ve spent and what you’ve got left
• submit invoices and claims for reimbursement at any time of the day or night, and from any location (because its available via web and app)
• receive SMS messages when claims are processed
• produce detailed expenditure reports

We explain all the best features of our client portal in this article. If you’re new to the portal, it’s a great place to start.

Expenditure reports

We’re pretty proud of the tools we offer our clients, and we try not to play favourites when it comes to their features and benefits… but honestly, we’re pretty fond of the client portal’s expenditure reports!

You may have seen emails from us at the start of each month reminding you to log into the portal for a spending snapshot of the previous month, but we’ll let you in on a little secret – you don’t actually have to wait until we email you before you can see what you’ve spent.

Just sign in to our client portal at any time (yep – that’s 24/7!) and, once you’re in, BINGO! You can pull a report that shows exactly what you’ve spent in each budget category, and you can customise the timeframe of the report to suit your needs as well.

Spending reports are powerful conversation-starters for discussions with your informal supports, your support coordinator, providers, and the National Disability Insurance Agency – and if you spot something that doesn’t look right, you can get in touch and ask us to take a look as well.

Information covered by the reports includes:

• details of your total plan budget, amount spent, and plan budget remaining.
• a breakdown of expenditure against each of your designated budget categories, showing the opening balance, funding spent, and available balance in every category.
• a provider spending summary that highlights the total amount claimed by each of your providers, so you can review costs and see if spending is on track and matched to the fees laid out in your service agreement.
• a breakdown of every invoice that’s been submitted (organised by budget category), with the provider name, service date, amount claimed, and payment status (i.e. NDIA-approved, paid’ or credit paid) all available.

When you have multiple providers, it can be difficult to know where you’ve spent funding and if the charges are correct. But when you utilise the reports in our client portal, everything you need is broken down into simple, bite-sized chunks of information.

Consider this scenario:

Your NDIS plan says you have $8000 allocated to ‘Consumables’.

You create a report that indicates you’ve spent $6000 in the category, and you’re only at the end of the third month of your plan period.

The report lets you know you’re spending too fast, and it looks like you’ll run out of funding early. That prompts you to take a deeper dive into the client portal to find out more.

With the information in hand, you get in touch with your support coordinator or your NDIA contact to discuss your options and plan your next steps (like revising your supports or asking for a review of your funding).

Easy, right? Click here to explore our client portal (if you don’t already use it), or if you’re already a convert and you know your way around the platform, just log in and select ‘Reports’ from the menu options.

Oh, and did we tell you that you can grant client portal access to your support coordinator (or someone else) if you want to? Just ask us and we’ll explain how.

We’re here to help

If you have any questions about our client portal, you can email us at enquiries@myplanmanager.com.au or call us on 1800 861 272 from 8am–5.30pm (SA time), Monday to Friday.