Choosing NDIS software: what to test in a demo before you sign

Every NDIS software demo looks good when the vendor is driving and the data is theirs. This guide is for the coordinator or finance lead who has to sit through three of those demos in a week and make a call that sticks for years. It gives you a concrete test plan — bring your own messy week of work, run it through each product, and judge what you actually see.

The single best thing you can do before any demo is pick a real week from your roster — ideally one with a sleepover shift, a broken shift (split across two time blocks), a cancellation, and at least one staff member who’s awkward to schedule. Ask the vendor to let you build it live, not watch them build their own pre-loaded example. A polished demo of a clean week tells you nothing about how the software behaves on your actual Tuesday.

Add the sleepover, the broken shift, the cancellation. A good answer: the system flags award issues — overlaps, too-short breaks between shifts, overtime — as you build the roster, before you’ve published anything, so you can fix a mistake while it’s still a draft rather than after someone’s worked it.

Have someone clock on and off from their own phone during the demo, not a prepared screenshot. A good answer: the location at clock-on is compared with the shift’s placed address, and any task or note gates you’ve set have to be cleared before the shift can be finished. Ask what the supervisor sees afterwards — a time, a location, and whether it matched.

Ask to see a week’s worth of timesheets approved in one action, not one by one. A good answer: a queue you can filter, select and approve together, with exceptions (unmatched clock times, disputed shifts) clearly separated out so bulk approval doesn’t mean blind approval.

Don’t just ask if the software “does NDIS claiming.” Ask the vendor to generate the bulk payment file from your demo data and open it in front of you. A good answer: a correctly structured file with the columns the NDIA’s portal expects, built from your actual rostered and approved shifts — something you could genuinely upload, by hand, to the provider portal.

This is the test most buyers skip, and it’s the one that saves the most admin time later. Ask the vendor to import a sample NDIA outcome file and show you where it tells you, per line, what was actually paid versus claimed — and specifically how a rejected line is surfaced, with the NDIA’s own rejection reason attached, so you can release just that line to re-claim. Ask what happens after the NDIA has decided.

If you work with plan-managed participants, walk through the whole loop: invoice inbox, provider record, claim, and the bank file (ABA) that comes out the other end, plus a client statement. A good answer shows you the full chain, not just an invoice template.

Ask to see the participant-facing side, not just the staff side. A good answer: a participant or nominated family member can see their own funding position, approve or decline an invoice, see their schedule, and see any orders — without seeing anyone else’s record.

Create a test incident that would be NDIS-reportable. A good answer makes the reporting deadlines obvious straight away: 24 hours from becoming aware for the first notification, and five business days for the full report, both shown on the incident itself, not buried in a settings page.

This is the question vendors answer least willingly, so ask it directly and in writing: if you leave, what do you get, in what format, and who can pull it — do you need to raise a support ticket, or can an administrator export everything themselves, any time, with no notice required? Get this answer before you sign, not after you’ve decided to switch.

The headline number in a pricing page rarely survives contact with your actual roster. Before you compare quotes, ask each vendor:

• Who counts as a user? Some pricing is per rostered staff member; some counts every login, including participants and family members on a portal. A “cheap” per-user price can get expensive fast once families are in the count.
• Is there a minimum? Small teams sometimes find the effective per-user cost is much higher than advertised once a monthly minimum applies.
• What does setup or migration cost? Ask specifically whether loading your existing clients, staff, price book and historical shifts is included or billed separately.
• Is GST included in the quoted figure? A quote that looks 10% cheaper sometimes just hasn’t added it yet.
• Which of the features you just tested sit on a higher tier? It’s common for award checking, the participant portal, or bulk NDIA claiming to be gated behind a premium plan. Ask the question for every feature you tested above, not just the ones in the brochure.

For the published price lists themselves, see the NDIS software pricing comparison — this guide is about how to test, that page is about what things cost. If you’re still working out what “NDIS software” or “care management software” even covers as a category, the care management software guide is a plainer starting point. And if you’ve already decided to move providers, the practical steps are in the switching guide.

Corella runs on one price that includes rostering, payroll export, the NDIA bulk claim file with its outcome read back, and the family portal, so every test above runs on the same plan. Each provider gets their own instance, hosted in Sydney, and the team can help with migrating your existing data across. For current figures, see pricing.