Participants

What a participant record holds

A participant is one person living in the house. For each participant SILWise stores their name, which meals they eat there, whether they take consumables, their age group, and their payment profile. You add and edit participants from the house’s own page, or while first setting the house up.

Meals and consumables: what the tickboxes do to the money

Every house has cost lines for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. Ticking one of these for a participant adds that meal’s cost to what they pay. Untick it and they are left out of that charge completely, as if they never eat that meal in the house. Which cost lines a house has comes from its cost-centre set: if that set adds extra food lines beyond these three, they appear here too, with the same tickbox and $/week box.

Next to each meal is a $/week box. Leave it blank and the participant is charged the normal weekly amount for that meal. Type a figure in the box and SILWise charges this one person that amount instead, without changing what anyone else pays.

Consumables works the same way as a single tickbox. Tick it and the participant’s share of the house’s consumables cost line is added to their total. Untick it and that cost drops off their bill entirely.

Under 21 or adult: why it matters for rates

Every participant answers Is this participant under 21 years old? with Yes or No. This is not just a label. The answer decides which Centrelink rate table SILWise uses to work out how much of this person’s rent and board the government is assumed to cover. Under-21 participants receive different Centrelink payments, at different rates, than adults, so this answer changes the whole set of payments SILWise asks about for that person.

Ticking a different age answer replaces every payment below it with that age group’s usual defaults, discarding whatever was there before - including a payment you had customised for this person. Set those payments again afterwards if the defaults do not match.

Separately, if a participant’s saved payments no longer match their saved age answer - old data, for instance - SILWise shows a notice when you open the house’s page telling you what it cleared, and pre-fixes the form to match. This check only runs when the page loads, not while you are changing the answer live, so save the participant to keep the fix.

The figures behind this distinction come from the government benchmarks SILWise applies. See Centrelink benchmarks for how those are set and kept current.

Payment profile

Alongside their age group, each participant carries a payment profile: the record of exactly which Centrelink payments they receive and at what rate, which SILWise uses to calculate their benchmark contribution to rent and board. See payment profiles for the full picture.

Where participants fit

Participants belong to a house. A house’s rent is split across its bedrooms for participants, not across the number of people living there, so adding or removing a participant does not by itself change anyone’s rent share. What it does change is board: meals, consumables and the Centrelink assessment all follow the participant, not the room.