Every day, you make decisions about your business, for your clients, and regarding your suppliers or partners. Sometimes the decisions are clear-cut and obvious but, other times, there are a number of options that all seem equally viable. Making the right decision is crucial because it can affect your business and it can also affect the quality of the outcomes your clients can achieve.

When it comes time to be audited by the NDIA, you want to be confident that you’ve made the right decisions and operated in compliance with all requirements at all times.

Furthermore, an NDIS audit requires you to have a high level of documentation that chronicles your processes, systems, activities, and more. If you can’t provide adequate documentation within a reasonable timeframe, you risk deregistration and loss of client funding. This can be devastating for businesses that rely on the NDIS, so it’s important to make sure you have everything in place before the auditors come knocking.

Data-driven decisions

It’s important to be able to prove that your organisation is operating in accordance with the values of the NDIS. This means your focus isn’t solely on making money but on improving outcomes for people with disabilities.
Using real-world data to make better decisions for your clients’ wellbeing will help you shine in your audits.

You can access real-world data in real-time by using an intelligent information management (IIM) system such as the one Storata has built based on M-Files to track information and provide comprehensive reports.
For example, by tracking your clients’ services, activities, outcomes, and information about their experiences, then analysing this information, you can start to uncover patterns and trends. These patterns and trends can be very revealing, and can help you understand where to direct your resources.

In one case, an NDIS service provider discovered that clients who should have been accessing a specific service in their area were unable to do so because of a lack of public transport options. This led to the service provider lobbying the local council to improve its public transport options for people with disabilities. Without access to that information, the service provider would have remained in the dark about why those people weren’t accessing a service they could benefit from.

The Storata solution powered by M-Files is ideal for tracking all of this information because of its holistic approach to data. Rather than managing information based on where it resides, it manages information based on what it is. So, when someone in the organisation searches for information about an individual or a service, the solution delivers all the relevant information. This provides context and improved understanding for your staff members.

Furthermore, you can run reports based on that information to deliver the deeper insights that can help you improve your clients’ access to services and their outcomes.

Preparing for audits

As well as ensuring your business has complied with the spirit of the NDIS to make sure you shine in your audit, it’s also important to make sure you’ve got the mechanical side of the audit under control. An auditor will need to see a vast amount of information, including:

• contracts and agreements with providers and clients
• policies and procedures relating to compliance
• timesheets, forms, call records, and other documents that track activities
• financial records and information on how budgets are managed

Getting all of this information together manually would create an enormous burden on your administrative staff and prolong the audit process.
Using the Storata IIM solution can dramatically reduce the amount of time required to prepare for an audit. Its powerful search capability means you can surface all the documents you need with a simple search. It doesn’t matter where the documents are stored; the system will surface every relevant document regardless of its location. This avoids situations where you don’t know what information you have, or you have to go searching through various folders and file-shares to find what you need.

You can even provide the auditor with permission to access the Storata solution’s M-Files interface, which puts the files they need at their fingertips and demonstrates that your organisation is fully compliant with all NDIS requirements.

Storata partners with M-Files to provide NDIS service providers with leading edge and affordable solutions to help you shine during audits. To find out more, contact us today.