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Hi! I’m Charlie – a proud disabled, chronically ill, Autistic, COVID-avoiding non-binary human from Melbourne. I work as a Disability and Healthcare Consultant. I share my lived experiences with organisations to advocate for more disability-inclusive and neuro-affirming systems and services. I also helped create Australia’s first Disability Pride Mural!
When I joined the NDIS two years ago, I was brimming with excitement to try self-management. I’d heard from other participants that self-managing gave maximum control over funding, it was quick, and it minimised the need to talk to people (a big bonus for an Autistic with an energy impairment).
Flash forward 18 months and I loathed self-managing; I was burnt out and I couldn’t wait to hand it over. What had gone wrong?
- Work-creep: Invoices pinged demandingly in my inbox every day. “Pay me!” they seemed to cry. No matter how hard I tried to herd this work onto one day of the week, my impulsive, conscientious, and memory-poor brain could not resist actioning invoices straight away – day, night or on weekends. It became NDIS all the time.
- Energy-drain: It took significant initial work (without any help available) to set up my self-management spreadsheet and processes, and to learn claiming. Then, because I use many independent providers rather than one big company, I had multiple invoices to process weekly. Self-managing took me a couple of hours a week. While this might be “quick” for many healthy people, having an energy impairment meant 2 hours = 1 whole day of my expendable energy.
- Uncertainty: There’s no rulebook about what you can/can’t buy with your NDIS funds. What information is available changes often. If I asked multiple people for advice, I would receive the responses – “definitely yes”, “definitely no” and “maybe”. My Autistic brain fretted over this lack of clarity.
- Pressure: It’s not legally possible to hand-over all self-management tasks to a bookkeeper. So if I was sick for a week (which happens frequently with my sick body) or I took a holiday, my self-management work built-up, invoices became overdue and things that I’d paid for from my own funds went unreimbursed.
The last straw was planning for surgery. I realised that I couldn’t and didn’t want to self-manage during my recovery. Over a month, I interviewed Plan Managers, and had false-starts with three. I was horrified to find that some made careless mistakes, had really simplistic participant software, frustrated my providers, and/or were disinterested or overly involved.
After kissing many frogs, I found my prince – PlanTracker! What appealed to me about PlanTracker was their:
- Participant portal: It has lovely graphs, a budgeting tool that I can play with, and I can follow the processing of invoices. As a bonus, if I decide to self-manage some of my funding again, I can use PlanTracker’s same software to help me do this.
- Customer service: PlanTracker are there when I need them – via email, online chat, phone or a scheduled video-chat. They don’t hassle me or waste my energy.
- Accuracy: PlanTracker does not make careless mistakes and they pay my invoices like clockwork.
- Collaborative approach: I still feel like I’m in charge of my funding with the bonus of having an advisor and partner. I ask PlanTracker about making a purchase and I get a straight answer. I have become more confident in spending my funds.
Although there’s been a learning curve in understanding the NDIS Price Guide and negotiating with my non-registered providers to meet these rules, I have no more weekly book-keeping. What a load off! I have gained 1 day a week to go for a swim, make art or write a blog post. I want other participants to know that if they are feeling anxious or over-whelmed with self-managing, they can switch!
Click here to ‘Make the Change’ to Plan Tracker