For occupational therapists
Your first scheme participant, from first email to first payment.
A working map of what you set up, in what order, and who actually pays you — written for occupational therapists taking their first NDIS-funded client.
Seven stages
- 01Before you say yes
- 02The sequence
- 03Three kinds of participant
- 04Your responsibilities
- 05A week in the diary
- 06Where it goes wrong
- 07Go deeper
What this is
Not mostly a clinical problem
Taking your first funded participant is not mostly a clinical problem. The therapy is the part you already know how to do. What is new is everything around it: whether you need to be registered, what has to be true before a claim will be paid, which of three completely different payment paths you are on, and which deadlines apply once the work has been delivered.
This site is a map of that. Seven pages, each one a stage of the same job. It is written for a small practice — a sole trader or a couple of clinicians — taking this on for the first time.
Sourced
The scheme publishes what a provider must do — charging within the price limits, telling participants prices before delivering them, keeping records, and requesting payment only after a support has been delivered.1 It publishes separately how you actually get paid, which differs by how the participant's plan is managed.2
1. What are the responsibilities of a provider. ndis.gov.au · 2. Guide to getting paid. ndis.gov.au
How to read this site
Two kinds of statement, never mixed
Two kinds of statement appear on these pages, and they are never mixed. Every page uses the same two treatments, so you can tell them apart at a glance without reading the label — though the label is always there too.
Sourced
A sourced statement describes something the official guidance establishes — an obligation, a payment path, a step in a process. It sits on a solid slate rule, and it carries a numbered link to the source it came from, next to the claim itself rather than in a list at the bottom. If you want to check it, the check is one click from the sentence.
From practice, not the guidance
A practitioner note — like this one — describes what the work tends to feel like: where attention goes, what surprises people, what gets noticed late. It sits on a dashed ochre rule and it is set in italic, so it never looks like the block above. It is observation, not obligation. Nothing in a block like this is a rule you can be held to, and nothing in one carries a figure.
Not established by the gathered guidance
Where a page needs to name something the gathered guidance does not settle, it says so plainly in a block like this and points you at the body that does settle it, rather than filling the gap with a guess.
Contents
Seven stages of the same job. Each is its own page.
The seven stages
Three ways in
You probably arrived here mid-question.
If you already have an enquiry sitting in your inbox and you are not sure whether you are allowed to take it, start with the three kinds of participant — that single question decides whether you need to be registered and how you get paid. If you have said yes and do not know what happens next, start with the sequence. If you have not taken anyone yet and want to set the practice up properly first, start at the beginning.
Scope
What this site does not do
This site does not tell you what to charge, how long a session should run, or how many participants a practice can carry. Those are set by the price limits, by your clinical judgement, and by your own capacity — not by a website. Where a figure matters, the site quotes it from the source that holds it and links you there, rather than paraphrasing it into something that may already be out of date.
It also does not cover the sibling topics in any depth — service agreements clause by clause, price limits and rates, travel, cancellations, the portals themselves. Those are separate subjects and they are named on the last page.
One page
The one-pager
Your first scheme participant: the setup and the sequence.
The same material as this site, compressed onto one sheet you can keep beside the desk while you set the first one up — what has to exist first, the order the work runs in, and the deadlines that bite. Same sources, cited as footnotes.
- What has to exist before the first support
- The sequence, and the deadlines that bite
- Where the software helps, and where it does not
We email it. Leave your details and it comes to you — no account, no login.