What SILWise does

Working out rent and board for a Supported Independent Living (SIL) or Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA) house usually means checking Centrelink’s rules for each participant, then doing the sums by hand in a spreadsheet. SILWise does that work for you. It holds what you know about a house and the people living in it, checks it against the current Centrelink rates and benchmarks, and tells you exactly what each participant should pay. Everything below is a permanent part of your setup, not a one-off form you fill in and forget.

The four things you work with

You will meet four ideas, in this order.

Cost-centre sets come first. A cost-centre set is a reusable list of the running costs a house needs to cover, such as rent, utilities and food. Build a set once and reuse it across every house that shares the same kind of costs, so similar houses are always costed the same way. Read more about cost-centre sets.

Houses and their participants come next. Each house you add holds its own participants and their details. This is where SILWise finds out who is sharing the costs, and how many people are splitting each bill. See houses and bedrooms for how a house is put together.

Calculations are what SILWise produces once a house has a cost-centre set and its participants in place. A calculation checks the current Centrelink rates and benchmarks and works out what each participant should pay.

Scenarios and PDFs are how you keep a calculation. Once you are happy with the result, save it as a scenario: a locked snapshot that will not change even if rates or costs move later. From a scenario you can download a PDF to hand to a participant or their support coordinator. Read more about scenarios.

How they fit together

Set up a cost-centre set once, attach it to a house full of participants, run a calculation against it, and save the result as a scenario you can revisit, compare and hand out as a PDF. Change the costs or the participants later, and SILWise will let you know a fresh calculation is due, so your figures never quietly go stale.

Who SILWise is for

SILWise is built for operations and finance staff at an NDIS SIL or SDA provider who manage rent and board for participants, not for developers or accountants building their own spreadsheets. If you already know what rent and board are, you already know enough to start.

Next, follow the quick start to set up your first house and save your first calculation.