What is a bulk payment request?
A bulk payment request or otherwise known as a bulk upload is the process behind exporting your payment data from your customer reference manager (CRM) into a CSV, aka an excel file. This CSV file contains all the necessary information you require to be paid for the services you have provided over a given period.
The file may include your registration number, Participant NDIS number, the support line item, and support duration.
There are specific fields that your data must prefill to make the file valid and for it to be accepted by the NDIS provider portal. For information on what fields are required, you can download the NDIS's Bulk Payment Request self-help guide
How do bulk payment requests save me time?
Bulk payment requests are most commonly used by NDIS providers with large numbers of payment requests. This is because it can be very time-consuming and inefficient to make individual payment requests for each of your Participants and the services you provide.
Using a bulk payment request, you can make a single claim for all the services you have provided over a specific date period, which the provider portal will then process and make payment.
To put it in perspective, each time you submit a manual claim, it can take you up to two minutes. If you are doing several of these each week, let's say 30 claims per week. There is potentially an hour of administration time spent manually uploading the payment data to the provider portal.
However, if you've got all your payment data in order (into a CSV), you can upload a bulk payment request file in less than two minutes, saving you lots of precious administration time!
If you need to get your payment data in order, start using Astalty Professional.
Astalty Professional manages your Participant information, tracks your billable hours and assists you in managing your workflow. It also includes the ability to export your payment data into a CSV file which can be used to make a bulk payment request.
Astalty Professional is specifically built Support Coordination Software.
To save you even further time, we have created an automatic reconciling tool, which uses the information from the bulk payment request receipt file and inputs that data into Astalty to automatically reconcile what has been paid and what is still outstanding.
We recently spoke with several providers, some of which spend up to five hours per week reconciling payments. With Astalty Professional, this process can be done in seconds, saving you hundreds of dollars in Administration.
This reconcile function is a major time saver for providers who make regular bulk payment requests.
Sign up for Astalty Professional here.
