Guide
Going solo as a behaviour support practitioner: what a practice used to do for you
Most of what is written for behaviour support practitioners assumes an employer. There is a supervisor, someone who keeps the credential spreadsheet, someone who notices that an authorisation expires next month.
Going out on your own removes all of that in one step, and the obligations do not shrink to match. This is what actually changes, and what to put in place before the first participant rather than after the first audit.
Not legal advice; the Commission's documents are the authority on everything below.
Looking for the evidence a practice has to produce at audit instead — Module 2A, outcome by outcome? See NDIS Module 2A: the eight outcomes, and where each answer lives. This guide is the practitioner's side: what changes when you go out on your own.
The gate before the gate
You cannot do behaviour support work until the Commission considers you suitable — and that applies even if you are supervised. Until then you cannot undertake behaviour support assessments, including functional behaviour assessments, and you cannot develop behaviour support plans in the delivery of NDIS-funded supports.
That is worth being blunt about because "I will work under someone's supervision while I build up" is a common plan and it does not work. Supervision is a condition of practising, not a substitute for suitability.
The condition that applies specifically to sole traders
Here is the part that catches people going out on their own, and it is not in most of the general guides.
If you are applying through the new entry-level pathway — the alternative assessment route for practitioners with less than six months of positive behaviour support experience, or with limited portfolio evidence — and you intend to operate as a sole trader, or as key personnel of a specialist behaviour support provider, there is an extra requirement.
You must intend to engage a practitioner assessed at proficient level or above, with at least two years' experience as an NDIS behaviour support practitioner, to provide clinical oversight of your work.
New entry-level applicants who intend to operate solo and do not intend to arrange that oversight may be found not suitable.
So the sequence for a new practitioner going solo is not "get suitable, then start". It is: arrange the clinical oversight, then apply, because the arrangement is part of what is being assessed.
And the clock keeps running. New entry-level practitioners have their suitability reconsidered twelve months later. That reconsideration is a portfolio question — which means the twelve months between are the evidence, and they are being accumulated whether or not anyone is recording them.
The five records a practice used to keep
Working inside a practice, these existed whether or not you thought about them. Alone, each one is now a decision you make or forget.
1. Supervision. Not the sessions — the record of them. Who supervised, on what date, what was discussed. Continuing professional development and supervision is one of the seven domains of the PBS Capability Framework, which means supervision is not admin sitting beside your practice; it is part of the practice being assessed. If your clinical oversight is a condition of your suitability, the record of it is the evidence that the condition is met.
2. Your capability against the framework. The framework describes four levels — Core, Proficient, Advanced, Specialist — across seven domains. Your self-assessment is a photograph of one day, and everything it asserts keeps moving.
3. Credential expiry. Insurance, registration, screening checks, first aid. In a practice somebody has a spreadsheet with dates in it. On your own, the failure is not that you let something lapse — it is that you find out you let something lapse.
4. Restrictive practice authorisations. If any participant you work with is subject to a regulated restrictive practice, the authorisation comes from the state or territory where the participant lives, not from the Commission, and every jurisdiction runs its own process with its own expiry. Two participants in two states is two processes. A practice absorbs that complexity across several people; alone it is all yours.
5. Your CPD. Twelve months of it, mapped to something. The reconsideration will ask.
The thing that actually goes wrong
None of these fail dramatically. They fail by going quietly out of date.
A credential has an expiry, so a calendar reminder covers it. The others have no expiry — they simply stop being true. Your capability record stops describing you the month your scope changes. Your supervision log stops being complete the first fortnight you are too busy to write it up. The authorisation you were sure ran to December ran to October.
And the cost is not the reconstruction week that a practice can absorb. On your own, the week you spend rebuilding a year of records is a week you are not seeing participants, and nobody pays for it.
So the test to apply to whatever system you choose — a folder, a spreadsheet, software — is this: when the work happens, does the record change by itself, or do you have to remember? If the answer is "remember", it will be wrong within a quarter. Not from carelessness. Because that update has no natural moment, and you are the only person who could have made it.
What a one-person practice actually needs
Less than a thirty-person one, and the difference is smaller than it looks. You do not need rostering, or approval chains, or role permissions — you are every role. You do need the same registers, because the obligations are written about participants, not about headcount.
That is an awkward shape for most software. Practice management tools are built for teams and priced per seat with a floor. Compliance platforms are built for provider organisations reporting upward. A sole trader falls between them and ends up in a spreadsheet, which handles four of the five records above badly and the fifth not at all.
Where NDPRO fits
Interested party — read accordingly.
NDPRO runs solo practices as a first-class case, not as a discount tier: the same registers, the same pathway, the same audit-pack export, at A$59 per user per month, which for one person is one seat. Supervision and professional development are logged against the capability domain they belong to, so the CPD record builds itself out of work already being done — which matters more solo than it does in a practice, because there is nobody else to do it for you.
It holds the restrictive practice register with state-by-state authorisations and their expiry, the credential dates with automatic reminders, and the participant pathway.
What it does not do: it does not generate the monthly restrictive practice return to the Commission, and it does not produce restrictive practice reduction plan reporting. It also is not your invoicing or your calendar — if you run Splose, it reads from Splose; if you do not, it runs on its own and you keep whatever you use for billing.
Before the first participant
Arrange the clinical oversight if you are on the entry-level pathway, and get it in writing. Then start the supervision record on day one rather than in month eleven — the reconsideration is twelve months out, and the only version of that portfolio that is cheap to produce is the one that was accumulating the whole time.
Related: keeping a PBS capability record current · behaviour support supervision, and what has to be on the record · what Module 2A asks for · state-by-state restrictive practice authorisation.
Sources: NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission — new entry-level behaviour support practitioner suitability guidance, and the Positive Behaviour Support Capability Framework. Read 28/08/2026. Both are revised from time to time; check the current versions rather than relying on any summary, including this one.