The situation

A 14-person NDIS provider based in Port Macquarie managed around 90 active participants across the Mid North Coast. The business had grown steadily from a two-person operation, but its administration had not kept pace. Service agreement end dates were recorded in a CRM, but no automated process watched them. Case managers were expected to track renewals manually across their caseloads, and in a busy practice covering participants from Taree to Kempsey, several agreements were slipping past their end dates unnoticed. The provider was losing clients not to competitor providers, but to administrative gaps. A lapsed agreement meant a pause in billable services and, in some cases, a client who simply did not re-engage.

In the NDIS context, a lapsed service agreement is not just a missed invoice. It can disrupt a participant's support plan, create compliance risk, and damage a relationship built over months of care.

The flow we built

A Make.com flow watches the CRM end-date field for every active participant and runs a tiered alert sequence:

  • At 60 days before expiry, an email is sent to the participant or their nominee confirming the agreement end date and prompting early renewal discussion.
  • At 30 days, a second email goes out and a task is automatically created in Microsoft Planner, assigned to the case manager responsible for that participant.
  • At 14 days, a final reminder email is sent and the case manager's Planner task is escalated to high priority.
  • A connected Google Sheet pulls funding utilisation data from the CRM daily. Any participant tracking below 60 percent of their plan with less than 90 days remaining, or above 95 percent with more than 60 days remaining, is flagged in the sheet for review.
  • The operations manager has a live Sheets dashboard showing all upcoming renewals, their current status, and any plans flagged as at-risk on utilisation.

The platforms

The provider's existing CRM for participant records and agreement dates. Make.com for the automation logic and scheduled monitoring. Microsoft Planner for task assignment. Google Sheets for the utilisation tracker and manager dashboard. The setup runs on an Advanced Bot Care plan. The monitoring caught a CRM authentication timeout three weeks after go-live, restoring the flow before any alerts were missed.

The results

Since deployment, the provider has recorded zero lapsed service agreements. In the quarter before go-live, three agreements had lapsed, each requiring remediation work to restore services and billing. The utilisation flagging revealed a secondary issue: two participants were consistently underspending their plans, which the case managers addressed proactively before NDIA review. The operations lead estimates the renewal flow saves the team around four hours of manual chasing per week across the caseload, time that now goes to participant support rather than administration.

The real gain was not efficiency. It was reliability. Every participant's renewal is now tracked with the same consistency regardless of how busy any individual case manager is.

What this could look like for your NDIS practice

If your service agreement process depends on individual case managers tracking end dates in their heads or on personal spreadsheets, a structured renewal flow like this one removes the human failure point entirely. Small business automation in Port Macquarie is something we do regularly for NDIS and allied health providers across the Mid North Coast.