Payment profiles

A payment profile is the record of which Centrelink payments one participant receives, and at which rate.

The profile is how SILWise works out what a person has coming in each fortnight. Those payments are what SILWise builds the Centrelink benchmarks from, meaning the caps on what you can fairly charge, so a wrong profile means wrong caps and wrong rent and board figures. Each participant has their own profile, set on their row. See participants for how those rows work.

The eight payments

SILWise tracks eight payment lines:

• DSP, which is the Disability Support Pension
• Pension Supplement
• Energy Supplement
• Rent Assistance
• Youth Disability Supplement
• Pharmaceutical Allowance
• Utilities Allowance
• Telephone Allowance

You never see all eight at once. The first question in the payments part of a participant row is Is this participant under 21 years old?, and your answer decides which lines appear.

Answer No and you get DSP, Pension Supplement and Rent Assistance.

Answer Yes and you get DSP, Rent Assistance, Youth Disability Supplement, Pharmaceutical Allowance, Utilities Allowance and Telephone Allowance. Pension Supplement is not part of an under-21 profile, so it drops out.

Energy Supplement never gets a box of its own. SILWise sets it to match the Disability Support Pension rate you pick, and saves the two together.

Rates within a payment

Each payment offers only the rates Centrelink publishes for it, so the choices differ from line to line:

• Household situations: Single, Single (sharer), Partnered (each), Illness sep. and Temp sep.
• Age and living arrangement, used for the pension of someone under 21: U18 home and U18 indep. for under 18s, 18-20 home and 18-20 indep. for 18 to 20 year olds. “home” means living in the family home; “indep.” means living independently.
• Phone tiers, used only by Telephone Allowance: Basic for a phone, and Higher for a phone plus internet.

Youth Disability Supplement has one rate only, so Single is the sole choice there.

When a payment is not received

Every payment except the pension offers Not received at the top of its list. Choose it when the person simply does not get that payment. A line set to Not received adds nothing to that person’s income and is left out of the calculation entirely.

The Disability Support Pension is different

Three rules apply to DSP and nothing else.

1. There is no Not received option. SILWise assumes every participant receives the pension, so you always pick a rate.
2. It decides the age group. The rate you pick tells SILWise whether this is an under-21 profile or an adult one, which is why the under-21 answer and the pension rate always agree.
3. It sets Energy Supplement for you, as above.

Because of rule 2, an older saved profile can end up holding a line that no longer fits the person’s age. SILWise clears those lines and puts a notice on the row that names every payment it cleared and asks you to save. Press Save on that row to keep the correction.

What a finished profile looks like

Open a house, look at a participant row, and you should see the age question answered and a rate chosen on every payment shown, with Not received against anything the person does not get. That is the point at which the figures on the calculation page can be trusted.

Next, read participants to see what else sits on a participant row, or Centrelink benchmarks to see what the income is compared against.