NDIS & Disability /Decisioning live field guide · 7 min

NDIS Plan Dashboard

Catches NDIS funding that would otherwise expire unspent — and leaves every spending decision with a person.

theater/demos/ndis_plan-dashboard.html · sandbox · read-only

Open

FIG. 1

The live demo, running on fabricated data. Open it to step through the full flow — every output is shown for a person to approve before anything happens.

How it would work

Reads each plan's budgets against actual spend, ranks the funding about to lapse, drafts a costed action for each — then hands the list to a person to review and approve before anything is booked.

Input 01

The plan + the spend against it

A participant's plan — start and end dates, management type, and the Core / Capacity Building / Capital budgets broken down to support-item lines — plus the claims and invoices spent against each line.

Agent 02

Maps spend, ranks the risk

Maps each claim to its support item, computes utilisation per line and category, compares spend pace against time elapsed, and ranks where funding will lapse before the plan or funding period ends.

Output 03

A ranked list, for review

A per-category burn-down plus a ranked list of at-risk funding, each with a costed suggested action for a participant, nominee, support coordinator or plan manager to review and approve. Nothing is booked or claimed on its say-so.

Where it works well

It does the watching no one can do by hand — expiry risk across a whole caseload, every line, every day.

Best for support coordinators and plan managers carrying a caseload, where the same expiry problem repeats across dozens of plans.
No one person can hold under-utilisation across a whole caseload in their head; this tracks every line every day.
The recaptured time goes back into participant conversations and the judgement calls, not budget bookkeeping.

The slow, invisible problem is funding quietly lapsing — Capital sitting unspent because a home-modification quote was never chased, Capacity Building expiring because therapy was booked fortnightly when the plan funded weekly.

Where it works badly

It is confidently wrong when spend isn't recorded against line items — a clean dashboard reading dirty data.

Weak when the plan period or category budgets were captured wrong at the start — every at-risk figure is calculated against them.
For a single participant with a simple, fully-utilised plan, glancing at a statement beats feeding the tool data.
Funding periods now release budget in stages (mostly quarterly); a dashboard blind to which period it is can misjudge what is actually at risk.

The honest test

If you can't say, right now, that spend is recorded against NDIS line items and reconciled at least monthly — this makes your wrong utilisation faster, not your funding safer.

Where invoices arrive as PDFs in an inbox, get paid, and only get categorised at plan-review time, the utilisation figures it reads are stale or miscategorised. A confident wrong number is worse than no number.

What it doesn't do — and shouldn't

It flags and suggests. A person decides whether the spend serves the participant.

WHAT IT DOES

Surfaces which lines are under-utilised against time elapsed

Drafts a concrete, costed action for each at-risk line

Shows the category, line item and current utilisation behind every flag

WHAT IT WON’T

Book, claim or spend anything

Push spend just to hit a utilisation target

Decide whether a support is right for the person's goals

An NDIS plan is a person's funded support, not a budget to be drained. "Use it or lose it" is the wrong instinct if the support isn't right for the participant, and providers carry obligations under the NDIS Practice Standards and the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission. The accountable person stays on the decision because the consequence lands on them, not the tool.

What your data has to look like

Spend recorded against NDIS line items, reasonably current, with plan dates and budgets captured accurately.

Typical readiness

across orgs we see, before the first job

Spend recorded against support-item lines

Needs shaping

Spend reconciled at least monthly

Needs shaping

Plan dates and category budgets, accurate

Usual weak point

Management type known

Usual weak point

Funding-period structure, where it applies

Needs shaping

The real first job

Getting spend recorded against line items consistently — at the point invoices arrive, not at plan review — is usually the real first job. It's a matter of how information is captured, not buying any new tool, and it's typically bigger and more valuable than the dashboard sitting on top of it.

Right fit if…

You carry a caseload — dozens of plans where the expiry problem repeats

Spend is recorded against NDIS support-item lines and reconciled monthly

Plan dates and category budgets are captured accurately at the start

You're a support coordinator or plan manager, not managing three plans by heart

Walk away if…

Invoices arrive as PDFs and only get categorised at plan-review time

You manage a handful of simple, fully-utilised plans you already know

Plan dates or budgets are unreliable, so every at-risk figure would be wrong

You want a tool that books or claims the spend for you

Open questions

The worried-buyer questions, answered straight

No. It flags funding likely to expire and suggests where it could go, but it never books or claims anything. A person — the participant, their nominee, or their coordinator — decides whether the spend actually serves the participant’s goals. “Use it or lose it” is the wrong instinct if the support isn’t right for the person, and the tool is built to leave that judgement with a human.

Then getting spend recorded against NDIS line items consistently is the real first job, and it’s the part we help with. Until invoices are categorised at the point they arrive, the dashboard’s utilisation figures will be stale or wrong, and a confident wrong number is worse than no number. Fixing how the information is captured is usually bigger and more valuable than the AI layer on top.

No. It does the watching no one can do by hand across a whole caseload — tracking expiry risk on dozens of NDIS plans at once — so their time goes to the judgement calls and the conversations with participants. It recaptures capacity; it doesn’t reduce the team.

Current enough to act on — for most caseloads that means spend reconciled at least monthly, and it now matters which funding period a line sits in, since plans approved or reassessed under the newer NDIS rules release budget in stages (mostly quarterly). A dashboard reading three-month-old figures raises alarms about funding already spent and misses problems that just appeared. The tool is only as timely as the data feeding it.

The demo you’re looking at runs on fabricated data and makes no claims against anyone’s plan — Emma Nguyen is not a real participant. For a real build, a participant’s NDIS number, plan and spend are sensitive personal information under the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles; data stays in your environment wherever possible, and we document where every field is read from and who can see it.

What it takes to build

3–5 weeks · 4 phases

Reused from template~65%

Bespoke to this skin~35%

stack · Claude · NDIS plan data · budget dashboard · review UI

What it would cost

Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed dates.

Bite-sized first piece

One contained change, low risk

Pilot build

Most builds land here

Embedded support

Scale on proof

Considering this for your caseload?

The honest place to start is a bite-sized first piece — usually getting spend captured against line items at the point invoices arrive. Tell us where it hurts; we'll play it back, scope it, and show you what's possible.

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