Finance Reads of the Week: NDIS, Aged Care and Childcare Compliance You Need Heading Into FY2027
The new financial year has landed a cluster of compliance changes across NDIS, aged care and childcare all at once — some starting this week, some just published in the last few days. Here's what's worth your attention if you're closing out FY2026 and planning for FY2027.
This Week's Reads
From 1 July, Supported Independent Living and digital platform providers must be registered with the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission under new registration group 0138, alongside a new SIL Supplementary Module of the Practice Standards. Certification is a full assessment process and typically takes 8 to 12 months, so if you haven't started, you're cutting it close. Unregistered SIL providers can keep operating during the transition only if they lodge their application by 1 October 2026 — miss that and you risk losing the ability to deliver services at all.
Published 23 June and effective 1 July, the new schedule lifts support worker rates roughly 4.8%, increases psychology to $252.99/hour, holds most other therapy rates, and splits therapy billing into separate line items rather than a single bundled rate. That last change may require billing system reconfiguration if you haven't already accounted for it. If you haven't updated billing software, quotes and service agreements against the new schedule, do it this week — not after your first rejected claim.
Starting with the FY25-26 Aged Care Financial Report, all residential providers must prepare and submit a Care Minutes Performance Statement externally audited under ASAE 3000 — the first time this has applied sector-wide, replacing reliance on targeted, randomised government audits with an annual independently assured reporting requirement across the whole sector. Updated auditor guidance and templates landed in the last week; the ACFR is due 31 October 2026. Auditors will reconcile your reported care minutes against rosters, payroll systems and timesheets, so the record-keeping discipline needs to be tight well before your auditor arrives. Engage them now — auditor capacity for this kind of engagement is going to get scarce as the deadline approaches.
Part of the broader national child safety reform agenda, this scheme starts 1 July for Queensland early childhood services, adding a new layer of mandatory reporting obligations around worker conduct — separate from, and in addition to, existing mandatory reporting requirements. If you operate childcare services in QLD, confirm your internal reporting processes and staff training are aligned before your first incident tests them, not after.
Easy to miss: NFP and community-managed childcare centres are required to register for GST once turnover reaches $150,000 — double the standard $75,000 threshold that applies to for-profit businesses. It's a small detail, but I've seen organisations register early and start charging GST unnecessarily simply because nobody checked whether the community rate applied. Worth a five-minute check against your current turnover.
Taken together, this is a week where the paperwork side of care sector compliance got noticeably heavier — new registration, new pricing, new audit requirements, new reporting obligations, all landing inside the same fortnight. None of these are optional extras; they're all live now or landing within the next few months, and none of them come with much runway if you're starting from scratch.
If I had to prioritise across all five for a finance team with limited bandwidth this month, I'd start with whichever one has the shortest lead time relative to its complexity: the Care Minutes Performance Statement audit, because auditor engagement takes time to arrange and the record-keeping needs to be clean well before the engagement starts. Registration processes are slow but predictable once started — the audit engagement is the one most likely to catch people out if it's left until September.
Compliance calendar getting harder to keep on top of?
PFL provides outsourced finance and AI automation for Australian NDIS, aged care, childcare and NFP organisations — built to keep pace with exactly this kind of regulatory load.
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- NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission — Mandatory Registration and Transition Pathways for SIL
- NDIS (NDIA) — 2026-27 Pricing Schedule and Annual Pricing Review
- Department of Health, Disability and Ageing — Care Minutes Performance Statement
- Queensland Family and Child Commission (QFCC) — Reportable Conduct Scheme
- Australian Taxation Office — GST Registration for Not-for-Profits
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