How to Get Your NDIS Policies and Procedures

After deciding to become a registered NDIS provider, one of the first things to start thinking about is your organisation’s documentation, including policies and procedures that will (a) meet the NDIS Practice Standards, and (b) reflect how you operate day-to-day.

There are four main ways providers can do this: write them yourself, buy a template pack, use a guided builder, or hire a consultant. This doesn’t take into consideration the cost of audit at all, as this is separately paid to your Approved Quality Auditor regardless of how you develop your documentation (the full cost of registration is covered here).

At a glance, here’s are the most common options:

Where to get documents	Typical cost	Suited for
Write them yourself	Your time, from a couple of weeks to a few months of part-time focus	Providers who know the standards well and are experienced at writing policies and procedures
Template pack	$12 to $70 (online marketplaces), mid-hundreds to low thousands (specialist sellers), several thousand (done-for-you)	Providers confident editing documents to fit
Guided builder	$385 (supplementary modules) to around $1375 (full certification)	Providers wanting a match to their practice without writing from scratch
Consultant	From around $2k to five figures for larger providers and complex registrations	Providers with budget who want it handled with confidence and individualised expertise

Write them yourself

Cost: your time. For a small provider writing to the Core Module only or the Verification module, a realistic figure is a few weeks to a few months of solid work done part-time around service delivery, and longer if you are starting from a blank page rather than adapting notes you already have.

This is definitely a legitimate option, but it’s best suited for a specific subset of provider: someone who understands the NDIS Practice Standards well enough to write to them. If you know what each Practice Standard is asking for and you can describe how your organisation meets it in your own words, documents you write yourself will describe your practice more closely than anything you’re going to be able to purchase, because you are the person who knows how you work. How to write NDIS policies that reflect your practice walks through the approach.

The limitation here though is the same as the strength, this really is your best option only if you really know the standards. If you are guessing at what an auditor wants, you will spend the time but potentially could still end up with gaps.

Buy a template pack

Cost: a few dollars to several thousand. This is the widest range of any option. At the low end, Etsy and other online marketplaces sell individual policies for a few dollars and bundles from around $12 to $70. The quality here is going to vary, and some packs marketed for the NDIS are not written for the Australian scheme at all (so just double check before you buy). At the specialist end, sellers who build specifically for NDIS providers price packs from the mid hundreds into the low thousands, often split by whether you need verification or certification documents and by module. There are a number of companies that also sell a done-for-you tier, where they’ll assist in branding the documents for you and lodge your application (this can run into several thousand dollars and starts to overlap with the price of hiring a consultant).

A template pack suits a provider who wants a structured starting point and is confident editing it to fit. The limitation is that the editing is the actual work, and it’s quite easy to underestimate how much is involved. Sellers of these kinds of templates will often tell you to plan one to two weeks of tailoring, and some say a month.

Use a guided document builder

(Yes, this is talking about our tool here – feel free to skip this part if you’re not interested

Cost: low hundreds to $1375, depending on scope. A guided builder asks you structured questions about how your organisation operates, the same kinds of questions an auditor would ask, and assembles your answers into policies and procedures. The SIL-specific builder sits around $385, and our tool covering the full Core Module for certification is closer to $1,375.

This suits a provider who wants their documents to match their practice but doesn’t have the time, or the confidence with the standards, to write them from scratch. Because the documents are built from your answers about your own operation, they describe your business rather than a generic one.

It won’t suit every provider, as the limitation is that you have to have the time available to work through the tools. The builder asks the questions, but the answers are yours, and answering them properly takes a few hours of genuine attention. It produces the documents, but it doesn’t implement them or train your staff, which is work that sits with you wherever the documents come from.

Hire a consultant

Cost: from around $2k into five figures. Policy development on its own typically starts at a couple of thousand dollars and rises with the number of supports you deliver and supplementary modules you’re being audited against. A full audit-readiness engagement, where the consultant develops your documents, assembles your evidence and runs a mock audit, can run from a few thousand dollars to more than $10k.

A consultant who takes the time to get to know you and your business is generally going to get you the best outcome. It’s the most expensive, but that’s the trade off. If you have the budget, it’s worth the investment to buy back your time and a lot of anxiety, and a strong consultant will work closely with you and tailor your documents to your operation properly. It suits a provider who would rather pay to have it handled (and have confidence that it’s being done well) than spend weeks or months doing it themselves.

The limitation here is the price, and you should still be aware that a consultant’s documents describe your practice only if your practice is settled enough to describe. (You still have to operate the way the documents say you do.)

The implementation of your policies and procedures is always up to you

None of the options above on their own will help you build a quality service or get you through your first (or subsequent) certification audit.

Documents might help carry you through a verification audit and the document-review stage of certification, because these are desktop reviews that are just looking to confirm that the right policies, procedures and records exist. At Stage 2 of the certification audit, the audit team is looking at whether you have implemented what your documents say, whether your staff understand it, and whether your records show it actually happening. What auditors look for sets out what that involves in practice.

A consultant’s curated suite of documents and a manual you wrote yourself face the same test at Stage 2: does your organisation do what your paperwork says. This is why the cheapest route is not automatically the worst and the most expensive is not automatically the best.

Choosing well

The right route depends on three things: your budget, the time you can give it, and how confident you are with the standards. A provider who knows compliance and has a fortnight can reasonably write their own. A provider with no time and a real budget is well served by a consultant. Our guided tools sit between those, for providers who want documents that fit without writing from scratch. A template pack can be a sound starting point if you are clear that the tailoring is the work.

What matters in every case is that the documents end up describing your organisation, because that’s what your audit assesses and most importantly that is what’s going to keep your participants safe. Whichever route gets you there is the right one for you.