A look at how software gets judged against the NDIS test, from budget apps through to the platforms families use for complex behavioural and developmental support.
More and more of the NDIS is showing up on a screen. Budget trackers, plan explainers, and a growing wave of apps built for genuinely complex care, tracking behaviour patterns, coordinating a whole support team around a child, turning a stack of clinical reports into something a parent can actually use on a hard afternoon.
None of that gets a special pass. Every one of these tools still has to clear the same bar as a wheelchair, a support worker, or a home modification: the reasonable and necessary test. It’s worth walking through what that actually looks like for software, because most participants and families have never had a reason to think it through, and because the evidence for both categories is stronger than people assume.
The same seven points, whatever the support
The NDIS defines reasonable and necessary supports as needing to relate to your disability, help you work towards your goals, help you work, study and take part in social activities, be value for money, be likely to be effective and beneficial, work with your mainstream supports and network, and be an NDIS support or agreed replacement support. [1]
That test was written with therapy and equipment in mind, long before app stores were part of anyone’s plan. But it doesn’t bend for software. It just gets applied to a different kind of tool.
Budget and plan understanding apps: drivers of financial independence
This is the more familiar end of the spectrum, and it’s more strongly aligned with the Scheme’s own goals than most people realise. The NDIA’s own research into self-management found that participants who manage more of their own funding report higher satisfaction, improved quality of life, and greater choice, control and independence, and that self-management is generally more cost effective than agency management. [2] Financial capability itself is now understood in the research as a genuine, learnable skill, an “advanced activity of daily living” that can be supported and scaffolded, not something a person either has or doesn’t. [3]
There’s also a scheme-wide reliance problem these apps speak directly to. The majority of participants currently pay for a plan manager, support coordinator, or both, and the Independent NDIS Review was blunt about what that’s grown into, describing plan management and support coordination together as a “combined billion dollar intermediary industry.” [4] Every dollar and every hour a participant can independently understand their own budget is a dollar and an hour not spent on that layer. A tool that helps someone read their own plan, track their own spend, and ask their own questions isn’t just convenient. It’s capacity building in the exact sense the NDIS is meant to fund, and it’s a direct, measurable way to reduce reliance on the scheme’s paid intermediary layer.
Apps for complex behavioural and developmental support
This is where the case is often at its clearest, and it deserves to be said plainly: these tools are not a lesser or more uncertain category of support. If anything, they can be more intrinsically tied to the disability itself than a budget app is.
Here’s the trick. Executive function, working memory, and the ability to generalise a skill from one setting to another are core, intrinsic parts of what autism and many neurodevelopmental disabilities affect. When cognition makes it harder to be independent, to work, to study, to hold a routine together across a school day and a home evening, a tool that streamlines that entire care journey isn’t sitting alongside the disability. It’s addressing it directly. Scoping reviews of assistive technology for cognition describe exactly this: mobile and digital tools used as a genuine compensatory strategy for executive function deficits in autism, supporting organisation, planning, time management and self monitoring. [5] [6]
This is also where apps that track behaviour and developmental progress do their best work. Families log observations and reports, the app helps surface patterns over time, and everyone supporting that child, parents, teachers, therapists, works from the same picture instead of five disconnected ones. That consistency isn’t a nice extra. Predictability and consistency across home, school and therapy are recognised as core mechanisms in autism intervention, and helping a skill or a strategy generalise across every setting a person moves through is one of the harder problems the sector is actively trying to solve. [7] A shared digital tool that carries the same behaviour data and strategies everywhere a person goes is a direct, practical answer to that problem.
The evidence backing this isn’t a handful of pilot studies either. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis, covering close to 4,750 families, found that caregiver skills training improves child development, reduces problem behaviours, and improves caregiver wellbeing. [8] Meta-analyses of telehealth-delivered caregiver coaching have found outcomes comparable to in-person delivery, meaning the same support that used to require a clinic visit can now travel with a family day to day. [9]
The one honest caveat worth naming, because it strengthens the case rather than weakens it: the strongest results come from tools that work alongside coaching and a real support team, not ones trying to replace them. [9] That’s not a gap in these apps. That’s them meeting the reasonable and necessary test on the “works with your mainstream supports and network” point, exactly as intended.
Making the actual case
Whichever category a tool sits in, the same seven points do the work:
- Does it relate to the disability, ideally intrinsic, but also adjacent to it.
- Does it connect to a stated goal in the plan.
- Is it good value against the alternative, whether that’s a plan manager’s hourly rate or a specialist’s clinic fee.
- Is there real reason to think it helps: evidence, a trial period, outcomes you can point to.
- Does it sit alongside the existing team rather than trying to replace them.
- Is it a registered NDIS provider or a clear low cost AT item.
Get those seven answered honestly and you’ve got a case, whether the tool in question is a budget tracker or a behaviour support platform.
Software isn’t a shortcut around the reasonable and necessary test. But when it’s built honestly, with a human still firmly in the loop, it earns its place in a plan, and the more these tools are backed, used and built on, the stronger that place gets.
Hai Helper is an NDIS technology platform built to meet that same reasonable and necessary bar: it helps you understand your plan, track your budget, and stay independent, working alongside your existing support team rather than replacing it. 10% of our profits go to disability organisations.
This is general information, not NDIS or financial advice. Always check with your planner, Local Area Coordinator, or plan manager about your own plan.
References
[1] NDIS, “Reasonable and necessary supports,” NDIS Official Website. [2] National Disability Insurance Agency (2022), “A narrative review of self-directed disability budget management,” NDIA, Australian Government. [3] Swan, Patterson, Bredy & Fleming (2025), “Conceptualisation of financial capability in adults with acquired cognitive impairment: A qualitative evidence synthesis,” Clinical Rehabilitation. [4] Independent NDIS Review Final Report, “Working together to deliver the NDIS” (Bonyhady & Paul, 2023). [5] “Assistive Technology for Cognition to Support Executive Functions in Autism: A Scoping Review,” Advances in Neurodevelopmental Disorders (2020). [6] Spalla, Yaddaden, Kenfack Ngankam, Gouin-Vallerand & Bier (2024), “Assistive technologies designed to support executive function impairments while promoting independence: A scoping review,” Journal of Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies Engineering. [7] Autism CRC, “Technology-based interventions,” Interventions for children on the autism spectrum: a synthesis of research evidence. [8] Reichow, Kogan, Barbut, Maggin, Salomone & Smith (2024), “Caregiver skills training for caregivers of individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis,” Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology. [9] Chen et al. (2023), “Parent-mediated telehealth interventions for autism spectrum disorder: a meta-analysis,” Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders.