Great care, efficient rosters: what the NDIS reset means for how you build your week 

With NDIS reform bringing tighter margins, expanded provider registration and a sharper focus on quality of supports, the providers who will thrive are the ones treating their roster as the engine of both care and commercial sustainability. 

The April announcement of NDIS reform changed the conversation for every provider in the sector. Scheme growth capped at two per cent for the next four years, expanded mandatory registration and a focus of bringing government line-of-sight to every dollar. It’s a clear message that quality of supports, with efficient cost management, is what the NDIS of-the-future will reward. 

For regional providers, the implications are pretty stark. Margins are already tight, and will likely get tighter, then add to it an even heavier compliance burden. All while participant expectations for service quality keep rising (and rightly so!). The instinct, when these three pressures meet, is often to choose whether we protect care, or protect the books? 

But that’s the wrong question to ask. 

Across NDIS providers, around 80% of costs is people. Wages, on-costs, allowances, travel, overtime. Being in control of that cost is what creates an organisation which can both give great support and be financially sustainable. Rostering, deciding who works where, when, and on what conditions, is the single biggest driver of both care quality and financial performance in your business. Get the roster right, and great care and a sustainable margin becomes the inevitable output, not a trade-off. 

Then there’s the other side of the same coin. If you get it wrong, the cost gets out of hand. Participants get the wrong worker, or no worker, or a worker who's burnt out from the last shift. Costs balloon because of overtime nobody planned for. SCHADS Award breaches accrue quietly until the audit lands. You and your team end up working harder for thinner returns and worse outcomes. 

The Rosterer can solve this problem, if they’re supported with the right technology. They're no longer a scheduler filling gaps.  

They're a strategic operator making decisions every hour that determine whether the business gives great care sustainably for the long-term or quietly runs out of road. The challenge is that SCHADS pay rules, broken shifts, sleepovers, public holiday loadings, minimum engagement, travel time, were never designed for a single person to understand correctly under pressure on a Tuesday afternoon. 

That's what Visualcare helps to solve with Award Aware Rostering. Understand the exact Award rules applying for any given shift, in the context of each pay run, at the point of decision, not three weeks later in payroll. By understanding the cost and compliance implications of a shift before it’s scheduled, additional costs like overtime stop being something that happens to the business and start to become something the business chooses.  

A provider was able reduced uncontrolled overtime from around $8,000 a fortnight to around $1,500 a fortnight after moving to Award Aware Rostering. They didn’t need to change staff, didn’t have to attract new participants, and stayed within the SCHADs rules. The only thing that changed was that the right information was in the rosterer's hands at the right moment. 

The next few years will inevitably be a challenge, but there’s great opportunity for providers who treat the roster as a strategic asset to be in a stronger position in 2030 than they are today. 

If you want to talk about what Visualcare and Award Aware Rostering in more detail, find Alex Duncan during the Expo. You can call on 0479116045 or scan the QR code below

For more antics and lived experiences of a mum with kids growing up with disabilities please see my blog at www.disabilityexposc.com.au/blog