Building — and holding the registration for — two NDIS businesses

Challenge

The NDIS market has a structural problem at both ends. Participants are handed a directory and told to cold-call providers, which puts the search burden on the person least equipped to carry it. Providers, meanwhile, wait weeks to be paid while carrying wage costs, and participants often have no visibility of their own budget until a statement arrives.

Underneath both problems sits an obligation stack that does not forgive shortcuts. Worker screening has to be current and checkable. Banned providers must be excluded, not merely flagged. Insurance and qualifications need to be verified rather than self-asserted. Incidents have to be captured in a form that supports Commission reporting. Price caps have to be respected at the point of quoting, because a breach discovered later is already a breach.

Most software in this sector treats compliance as a checkbox on a signup form. We took the view that if the compliance state is not computed, it is not real.

Approach

MyCareFinders inverts the marketplace. A participant posts what they need; providers respond with proposals. That single design decision moves the effort from the participant to the businesses that are being paid, and it makes provider quality comparable rather than alphabetical.

Behind it we built the verification layer the market was missing. Worker screening records synchronise against the registry rather than sitting as uploaded assertions. Banned-provider checking runs as an exclusion, not a warning. Insurance certificates and qualifications are uploaded into private storage and verified before anything is displayed publicly, and verified status appears as a platform-issued badge so a participant is reading our verification rather than a provider’s claim about itself. A provider cannot go live until a computed compliance gate passes every one of these conditions. Safeguarding and incident management were wired to the reporting workflow from the first release, and NDIS price caps are enforced when a quote is built.

MyMoney MyGoals took the money side. Local Knowledge holds the NDIS plan management registration, which means the regulatory obligation sits with the practice rather than with a vendor we could point at. The service publishes provider payment in two to five days, live budget visibility for the participant on their phone, and no cost to the participant because the NDIA funds plan management directly.

Both were built with AI tooling. That is why two regulated properties exist rather than one — the speed came from the build method, not from cutting the compliance work.

Outcome

Both properties are live and operating. MyCareFinders publishes a browsable base of 48,291 registered providers. MyMoney MyGoals publishes provider payment in two to five days at zero cost to the participant.

For a client, the point is not the software. It is what building it required us to learn. When an NDIS provider, allied health practice or disability operator asks us about their compliance exposure, we are not reasoning from a guidance note. We built the screening synchronisation. We designed the go-live gate. We hold the plan management registration and we carry the obligation that comes with it.

That is a different conversation from one an adviser can have after reading the same rules you have already read.