KB Type: Concept
Domain Area: Operational
Confidence: Provisional — requires Andrew's research to verify
Depth Hint: Standard
Version: 1.0 — 2026-05-01
Status: Provisional

The "Dual-Budget Scenario" (Configuration C) occurs in PACE plans when a participant's Category 07 (Support Coordination and Psychosocial Recovery Coaching) budget contains explicit planner instructions for both Level 2 Support Coordination and Level 3 Specialist Support Coordination. In the current PACE portal (MyNDIS), the funding for these two different support levels is pooled into a single Category 07 balance rather than separated into distinct digital wallets. Consequently, NDIS support coordinators must manually track the sub-budgets internally against the participant's service agreement to ensure the Level 3 allocation is not accidentally overspent on Level 2 supports.

The dual-budget scenario represents one of the most complex configurations in the PACE system. When an NDIA planner authorises both Level 2 Support Coordination (07_002_0106_8_3) and Level 3 Specialist Support Coordination (07_004_0132_8_3) within a single plan, they typically include explicit instructions in the "Support Details" section specifying the allocation amounts for each support level. For instance, a plan might have a total Category 07 budget of $19,054.00, with instructions that $8,000 is specifically for Level 3 Specialist SC and the remainder for Level 2 Coordination. Despite this clear legal and financial instruction, the MyNDIS portal displays only a single combined balance.

The fundamental constraint driving the dual-budget challenge is the PACE portal's inability to track funding at the item-code level. The system pools all Category 07 funding into one aggregated digital wallet, showing only the total "Released," "Spent," and "Available" amounts. It does not create separate tracking wallets for Level 2 and Level 3 supports, even when the planner's instructions explicitly ring-fence portions of the budget. This technological limitation means the portal cannot prevent a provider from inadvertently billing Level 3 funds for Level 2 services.

Because the PACE portal cannot enforce the sub-budget separation, the entire responsibility for tracking falls on the registered provider. Providers must:

For providers building new billing systems (such as the "iinsight" system mentioned in the source material), this requires custom architectural logic to handle these dual-budget configurations automatically.

Without diligent internal tracking, there is a significant risk that participants could exhaust their specialised Level 3 allocation on standard Level 2 coordination tasks. Because both support levels draw from the same pooled wallet in the portal, there is no system-level guardrail preventing this. Once the Level 3 funds are depleted, the participant loses access to the highly specialised support they were allocated, even though the planner explicitly intended to reserve those funds for specialist services.

This article is Provisional — derived from NbLM research summary. Requires Andrew's research to verify the legislative connections and operational mechanics.

For context graph extraction. Do not edit manually — updated by lint.