Glossary
Most glossaries in this sector define a term using three others they have not defined yet. These are the short versions, in the order a provider actually meets them — and where a term turns on a number or a deadline, it points at the guide that carries the source rather than repeating the figure here.
Who does what, and which body you are actually dealing with.
Australia's national scheme for funding supports for people with permanent and significant disability.
Two different bodies sit behind it and providers deal with both, which is the source of a good deal of confusion — see NDIA and NDIS Commission below.
The agency that runs the scheme: it approves plans, sets price limits and pays claims.
If your question is about money — a price limit, a support item, a claim that was rejected — the NDIA is who you mean.
The separate regulator for provider quality and participant safety: registration, the Practice Standards, the Code of Conduct, reportable incidents and restrictive practices.
If your question is about safety, conduct or an audit, it is the Commission and not the NDIA. Providers routinely send things to the wrong one.
A person with an approved NDIS plan.
The scheme's own word, and worth using deliberately — 'client' and 'service user' both carry a relationship the NDIS deliberately inverted.
The participant's approved funding, divided into budgets by support category and running for a set period.
The plan is the constraint every roster and every claim eventually runs into: a support can be perfectly appropriate and still be unfundable because the budget it would draw on is exhausted.
How a participant's funding is administered — by the agency, by a plan manager, by the participant themselves, or a mix across categories.
It decides who you invoice and how you get paid, and one participant can be managed differently in different categories of the same plan.
Someone funded to help a participant understand and use their plan, and to connect them with providers.
A coordinator is often the person who chooses you, which makes them a different kind of reader from the participant.
The vocabulary a claim has to be right about before it will be paid.
The budget bucket a support is funded from. There are fifteen, and a plan holds funding against them individually.
Assistance with Daily Life, Transport, Consumables, Assistance with Social, Economic and Community Participation, Assistive Technology, Home Modifications, Support Coordination, Improved Living Arrangements, Increased Social and Community Participation, Finding and Keeping a Job, Improved Relationships, Improved Health and Wellbeing, Improved Learning, Improved Life Choices, and Improved Daily Living Skills.
A specific, numbered entry in the NDIA's catalogue — the thing you actually claim against.
The number carries the rules with it: which category it draws from, what it may be charged at, and often which day type or ratio it applies to.
The maximum the NDIA considers reasonable for a support item. It is a ceiling, not a fixed price.
Published as a schedule that is reviewed annually, and the document has been renamed at least once — always read the current one from the NDIA's own page rather than a saved copy.
A request for payment for a support that was delivered, against a specific support item and a specific participant's budget.
Nearly every rejected claim fails on something structural — the wrong item, a date outside the plan, a budget already spent — rather than on whether the support happened.
Submitting many claims at once as a file, rather than entering them one by one.
The practical unit of work for any provider past a handful of participants.
The NDIA's statement of what it actually paid, against what you claimed.
Reconciling the two is where underpayments are found. A claim you submitted and a claim that was paid in full are not the same event, and only one of them is visible without looking.
The agreement between a provider and a participant setting out what supports will be delivered and on what terms.
The shapes a service takes, which decide how it is rostered and priced.
Funding for the help a participant needs with daily tasks in a shared or individual home, usually delivered on a roster that never stops.
SIL is the model where overnight arrangements, ratios and the award interact most expensively — a house is staffed continuously whether or not anything is happening.
Funding for the dwelling itself — the bricks and mortar — rather than for the support delivered in it.
Distinct from SIL and often confused with it: SDA pays for the housing, SIL pays for the people.
Short stays away from a participant's usual home, including what is often called respite.
Supports delivered out in the community rather than in a home — the model where travel, mileage and broken shifts dominate the cost.
How many participants a worker is supporting at once, which changes both what may be claimed per participant and what the shift costs to staff.
Where the money is quietly won and lost. Anything here that turns on a number links to the guide that carries the source.
The Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award — the modern award covering most disability support workers in Australia.
Award code MA000100. It is the document that decides what a rostering decision actually costs, and the reason two identical-looking shifts can be priced very differently.
The minimum number of hours a worker is paid for when engaged, regardless of how long the visit runs.
The exact figure depends on employment type and classification, so it is not a number to take from a vendor's website — Fair Work's own tool answers it for a specific employee.
Two separate engagements on the same day rather than one shift with a break in the middle — it attracts its own allowance.
Almost never rostered deliberately. It appears when a morning visit and an afternoon visit were arranged by different people and nothing ever looked at them together.
An overnight arrangement where a worker sleeps at the workplace and is available if needed, with the sleep component treated differently from time worked.
The distinction matters for overtime: a tool that counts the whole night as hours worked will invent overtime the award never asked for.
An overnight shift where the worker is awake and working throughout, rather than sleeping and available.
A different arrangement from a sleepover and paid differently. Which one a shift actually is depends on what the worker is required to do, not on what the roster calls it.
A higher rate for hours worked at less sociable times — evenings and nights, Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays.
Public holidays are the awkward one, because they are set per state and territory rather than nationally — the same date can be a penalty day in one branch and an ordinary day in another.
An additional percentage paid to casual employees in place of leave and other permanent entitlements.
Applied on top of the base rate before penalties and allowances are worked out, so it magnifies every other decision rather than sitting beside them.
What an hour costs the organisation beyond the wage itself — superannuation, workers' compensation, leave accrual and the rest.
The reason a breach costs more than the extra hours suggest, and the number that turns an award warning into a figure a manager can act on.
The clearance a worker needs to do certain roles, issued by a state or territory and checkable against a national database.
It expires, and an expired clearance is not a paperwork problem — it can make a rostered shift one the worker was not permitted to do.
The obligations that carry clocks and consequences.
An incident of a kind the NDIS Commission must be told about, which starts a notification deadline and a separate deadline for a fuller report.
The clock starts when the right people become aware, not when the event happened — so an incident described in a note nobody read has not started its clock until somebody reads it.
Anything that has the effect of restricting a person's rights or freedom of movement. Five kinds are regulated: chemical, physical, mechanical, environmental and seclusion.
Using one without authorisation is itself reportable, which is why a lapsed authorisation is a more serious problem than an untidy record.
The plan that sets out strategies for a participant, and under which any regulated restrictive practice must be authorised.
It is what makes a restrictive practice defensible, which is why a register that cannot point to the plan is not really a register.
Approval for a regulated restrictive practice, granted for a period and requiring review — it is a state that can expire.
The common failure is not an unrecorded practice but a recorded one whose authorisation quietly lapsed while it carried on being used.
The quality standards registered providers are audited against, covering rights, governance, service delivery and the support environment.
Which parts apply depends on what you are registered to deliver, so two registered providers can be audited against materially different sets.
The conduct obligations that apply to providers and workers — including unregistered ones and including individual workers personally.
The independent assessment of a registered provider against the Practice Standards, on a cycle and by an approved auditor.
What is actually being assessed is evidence, which is a different thing from compliance — a provider can be doing everything right and fail on being unable to show it.
The obligation to take reasonable care to avoid foreseeable harm to the people you support.
Sits alongside dignity of risk rather than overriding it, and the tension between the two is the substance of a great many incident reviews.
A participant's right to make their own choices, including choices that carry risk.
The counterweight to duty of care. A service that eliminates all risk has usually also eliminated the person's say in their own life.
These are plain-English explanations to help you follow a conversation, not legal or industrial-relations advice. Where a term rests on a rule we have linked the body that publishes it — the NDIA, the NDIS Commission or the Fair Work Ombudsman — and anything you are about to act on should be checked there.