Is Your PMS Costing You Time You Don’t Have?
By Bruce Klaic (MBA) Wednesday, June 25, 2025
For most NDIS-funded physio clinics, administrative overload isn’t just a headache – it’s a direct threat to sustainability. One of the main culprits? Your practice management system (PMS). Allied health professionals already spend an average of 9 hours per week on administrative tasks. That’s nearly a full day each week lost to paperwork and coordination – time that could be spent with patients or improving your business. If your PMS isn’t helping to automate and streamline those tasks, it may be costing you precious hours you simply don’t have.
The Problem: Drowning in Admin That Should Be Automated
Running a small clinic with NDIS patients means dealing with a mountain of administrative tasks every day, including:
- Complex, ever-changing billing rules: NDIS price guides and claim rules update frequently, and keeping up can be tedious.
- Session notes and non-face-to-face billing: Documenting each session (and billable prep/reporting time) and calculating travel or cancellation fees.
- Compliance paperwork and audit prep: NDIS funding comes with strict documentation requirements, from service agreements to outcome reports – all needing proper filing and readiness for audits.
- Follow-ups and schedule juggling: Constant appointment reminders, rescheduling cancellations, and managing waitlists to reduce no-shows.
If your current PMS doesn’t handle these efficiently, you’re left doing them manually. That’s double-entry of invoices, copying notes into claim forms, endless emailing and phoning clients – all tasks a good system could do in seconds. Every extra minute spent on admin is a minute not spent delivering care or growing your practice.
Why Efficiency Matters More Than Ever in 2025
This year has thrown new challenges at NDIS providers. Effective 1 July 2025, the NDIS slashed the price limits for many therapy services and halved travel reimbursements for providers. In other words, physio clinics are now expected to do the same work for significantly less funding. Allied health industry groups warn that these cuts, combined with rising operating costs, could make it financially unsustainable for many clinics to continue delivering complex care One regional physiotherapy business estimated the changes would cost them $34,000 in lost annual revenue – a huge blow for a small practice.
With tighter margins, efficiency isn’t a luxury; it’s a lifeline. Every hour of clinician time lost to admin now directly eats into an already thin profit margin. If your team is already stretched, even a few hours a week wasted on clunky software or manual processes can push staff toward burnout. In fact, 60% of allied health professionals report high stress levels due to excessive admin workload Clinics simply can’t afford inefficient systems when funding is capped and demand for services continues to grow. The good news? You can’t control NDIS policy, but you can control your clinic’s processes. By tightening up your admin and reclaiming those lost hours, you can help offset the price cuts and protect your team’s well-being.
How the Right PMS Can Save You Time (and Money)
Modern practice management platforms are rising to meet these challenges. The right PMS can drastically reduce your admin burden – freeing up hours each week. Key features of an NDIS-friendly PMS include:
- Seamless Xero Integration: Your invoices and payments sync automatically with accounting. No more double data entry between the PMS and Xero – a task that can otherwise consume hours weekly. (For example, integrating a PMS with Xero can save hours with batch invoicing, eliminating manual reconciliation.
- NDIS-Ready Billing Workflows: A good system will support NDIS-specific billing needs out of the box. This means: bulk uploading claims to the NDIS portal, managing custom line items (travel, cancellations, non-face-to-face support) according to the latest price guide, and auto-linking session notes to each claim. Such automation ensures you capture every billable item and stay compliant effortlessly.
- Appointment Automation: Built-in text/email reminders and waitlist management help reduce no-shows. In an NDIS clinic, a missed appointment isn’t just lost care – it’s lost income and potentially lost progress for a client. Automated reminders and easy rebooking workflows keep your schedule full and your clients engaged.
- Digital Intake & Consent Forms: Say goodbye to printing and scanning. Modern platforms let clients complete intake questionnaires, NDIS service agreements, and consent forms online before their first visit. This not only saves your front desk staff time, but also feeds data directly into the system – no transcription errors, and a smoother onboarding experience for clients.
- Real-Time Utilisation and Cancellation Reports: If your PMS can’t show you how booked each clinician is, where cancellations or DNAs (Did Not Attend) are spiking, or the ratio of face-to-face to non-face time being billed, you’re flying blind. Good software gives you dashboards for these metrics. For example, you should be able to see if a therapist’s calendar is only 60% full or if Tuesday afternoons have an unusually high cancellation rate. Armed with that data, you can adjust staffing, re-engage clients, or target new referrals to fill gaps. In short, actionable reports help you steer your clinic strategically instead of reacting blindly.
Consider what these improvements mean in practice. By automating and streamlining, you might reclaim dozens of minutes each day that were previously spent clicking and typing. Over a week, that adds up. In fact, one NDIS-registered physiotherapy clinic (10 therapists) found that by automating invoicing and integrating their PMS with accounting, the owner saved 5+ hours of admin work per week. That’s five hours freed to see patients, supervise staff, or simply go home on time. And if each clinician in your team can spend even 30 minutes more per day on client-related work instead of admin, that’s roughly 11 extra hours a month across the clinic – time that could translate to additional billable sessions or much-needed breathing room for an overworked staff.
Recommended Platforms for NDIS Physio Clinics
With many clinics reassessing their software, we’ve seen a clear trend: more practices are moving to purpose-built PMS solutions that handle NDIS requirements gracefully. Two platforms in particular are getting great feedback from small allied health teams around Australia:
- 🟢 Splose: Designed specifically for allied health, Splose offers a clean, easy-to-learn interface with powerful automation for NDIS workflows. It has certified two-way Xero integration (invoices and payments sync seamlessly) and robust features for NDIS claims. Clinics appreciate that Splose keeps up with NDIS changes – from price guide updates to bulk claim exports – without complicated workarounds. It’s intuitive but comprehensive, which means less training time for your team and fewer mistakes.
- 🟢 Coreplus: A popular choice for multidisciplinary clinics, Coreplus brings strong compliance support and customizable note templates (handy for meeting NDIS documentation standards). It handles NDIS billing well, including bulk payment requests and claim reconciliation. Coreplus also offers more advanced reporting tools than many older systems, so you can dig into your clinic’s performance metrics. While its interface is a bit dated compared to Splose, many users find that the depth of features – especially for compliance and analytics – makes up for it.
Of course, there are other practice management systems out there (Cliniko, Halaxy, Nookal, and newer entrants). The key is to choose one that reduces NDIS-related admin as much as possible. The platforms above get our nod because they were built with Aussie allied health workflows in mind. They can handle the nitty-gritty of NDIS billing, integrate with your other tools, and ultimately save you time.
Yes, Switching Systems Is a Hassle – But Staying Stuck Hurts More
We get it: changing your PMS feels like opening Pandora’s box. There’s data migration to worry about, staff training to conduct, and potential short-term disruption to your operations. It’s tempting to stick with the “devil you know,” even if your current system is frustrating, because at least it’s familiar. But ask yourself honestly: what is it costing you to keep pushing through with a system that holds your clinic back?
If your receptionist or practice manager is spending two days a week wrestling with invoices and spreadsheets because the system can’t do what you need, that’s a huge hidden cost. If you’re personally staying late to type up notes or fix billing errors, that’s unpaid overtime you’re donating – and probably an extra bit of burnout each day. On the flip side, the benefits of a better system start compounding quickly. Even a modest gain of 30 minutes a day in saved time adds up to around 11 hours a month reclaimed. At the current NDIS physio rate (~$183/hour), that’s equivalent to about $2,000 in additional billable services you could provide each month – or simply 11 hours of stress you eliminate for you and your staff. Over a year, it’s well over 130 hours of time saved.
Think about what you could do with that time: see more clients (boosting revenue), catch up on documentation within work hours instead of late at night, or invest in quality improvement and staff training. In short, a better PMS can pay for itself not just financially but in quality of life for your team. Yes, there’s effort involved in switching – but staying stuck in inefficiency is a far greater long-term hassle.
The Takeaway
If your practice is feeling the squeeze from the NDIS price changes, your practice management software is one of the first places to look for relief. You can’t control government pricing decisions, but you can control your systems and how efficiently your clinic operates. In an environment where allied health professionals spend less than 60% of their time on patient care (especially in rural areas) due to other responsibilities optimising your workflows is crucial for survival.
Here’s a plan to get started:
- Audit your current PMS. Map out all the admin tasks your team does in a week. Identify which of those tasks your software should be automating or simplifying. Are you entering data twice in two systems? Chasing unpaid invoices manually? Struggling to pull basic reports? Write down these pain points.
- Calculate the time cost. Be brave and put a number on it – you might be shocked. If, say, your physio spends 15 minutes after each appointment writing notes and creating an invoice because the system doesn’t pre-fill anything, and they see 30 patients a week, that’s 7.5 hours lost. Multiply similar inefficiencies across all your processes. (Remember that industry surveys show ~9 hours/week on admin is common – so if you feel swamped, you’re not alone.) Translate that into dollars or extra client sessions to really understand the opportunity cost.
- Explore better options. Demo the PMS platforms that are known to work well for NDIS clinics. Look for NDIS-specific features and ask the vendors tough questions about how their system will handle your list of pain points. Will it auto-update to new NDIS price guides? Can it generate the bulk upload CSV for the portal? How does it manage travel and cancellation fees? Involve your team in trials – they’ll be using it daily, and buy-in is important.
- Make a switch plan (if needed). If you conclude that your current system is indeed holding you back, map out a transition. Most modern providers offer data migration tools or services – for example, exporting clients and appointments from the old system and importing to the new one. Plan the switch for a quiet period if possible, and allocate time for staff training. It might mean running the old and new systems in parallel for a week or two as a safety net. Yes, it’s some work – but remember why you’re doing it. Every hour you invest now is likely to save dozens later.
In the end, a great PMS is like an invisible assistant: it handles the busywork in the background, so you and your clinicians can focus on what truly matters – supporting your clients. With NDIS funding tighter, clinics that embrace efficient systems will be the ones that survive and even thrive by doing more with less. Don’t let outdated software be the reason you’re working late or falling behind. By upgrading your practice management processes, you can reclaim the time you thought you’d lost and protect your clinic’s sustainability in these challenging times.
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