Fee Type Processing Rules

Not every fee is billed the same way. The billing engine reads the Fee Type on each Agreement Item's linked Support Item and applies the processing rules that fee type requires: some fees are subject to regulatory caps, some are gated by a duration, and most are billed straight through. This article explains how fee types are classified, how caps are validated, what happens when a period produces no charge, and how billing changes on the day a resident departs.

Fee type classification

The engine groups fee types into three handling classes.

Handling class	Fee types	How they are billed
Capped	Non-Clinical Care Contribution (NCCC), Means Tested Care Fee (MTCF)	Routed through the Cap Service, which limits the chargeable amount to remaining cap headroom.
Retention	RAD/RAC Retention	The deduction amount is calculated by the Retention Service; the Cap Service gates whether retention is still within its duration.
Pass-through	Income Tested Fee (ITF), Basic Daily Fee, Hotelling Contribution, Daily Accommodation Payment, Daily Accommodation Contribution, Accommodation Charge, and other fees	Billed at their calculated amount with no monetary cap.

The Cap Service is the authoritative gate on which fee types have cap semantics. It only accepts NCCC, MTCF, ITF, and retention. The accommodation and daily fees are never sent to it; they pass through at their raw amount.

The Income Tested Fee is a pass-through fee with no monetary cap of its own.

Cap validation

For capped fee types, the engine asks the Cap Service to evaluate the proposed charge against every applicable cap before billing it. The service returns the chargeable amount (clamped to remaining headroom, or zero if fully blocked), the cap that was hit, and a human-readable reason.

Fee type	Caps applied
NCCC	A duration cap (no NCCC after the resident's NCCC expiry date) and a lifetime cap (cumulative NCCC against the configured lifetime cap).
MTCF	An annual cap (per-resident, see below) and a lifetime cap.
RAD/RAC Retention	A duration gate: no retention after the retention expiry date. The amount itself is capped by the Retention Service.

The cap values themselves are configured on the RACS Configuration tab and documented in Caps and Duration Settings.

There is no daily monetary cap. Daily rates are simply applied to the number of chargeable days in each period by the period calculator. The caps that exist are annual, lifetime, and duration based.

When a cap is reached

When a cap is engaged, the chargeable amount is reduced to whatever headroom remains (which may be zero), and the engine sets Cap Reached on the Agreement Item. A capped item drops out of the engine's selection on subsequent runs, so it is not re-evaluated until its circumstances change (for example, an annual cap resets). A charge that exactly fills the remaining headroom is still treated as a cap hit so the item is correctly flagged.

The MTCF annual cap year

The MTCF annual cap does not follow the financial year. Each resident has their own cap year that begins on the anniversary of their first entry to aged care. When a run falls on or after the next anniversary, the engine rolls the cap year over: it resets the resident's annual cumulative totals to zero and advances the cap year start to the current anniversary, so a fresh year of headroom is available for that day's charge. This rollover happens before the annual cap is evaluated.

When a period produces no charge

A period can resolve to nothing chargeable for more than one reason, and the engine treats each differently. The distinction matters because it decides whether the item bills that period again.

Situation	Invoice line	Billing cursor	Outcome on the item
A cap engages and leaves nothing chargeable	None	Not advanced	Cap Reached is set and Billing Status goes to Complete. The item is finished and drops out of scope
The period is legitimately worth nothing, from a zero rate or a zero quantity on the Agreement Item	None	Advanced	Billing Status goes to Complete. The item consumed its period and moves on to the next one
The derived line quantity is blank or not positive	None	Not advanced	The item is failed and logged for triage
A retention item's last deduction falls inside its cadence window	None	Moved to the rescheduled date	Billing Status goes to Complete. No charge is raised for this period

The engine never creates an Invoice Line Item with a quantity of zero or less, whatever the fee type. Such a line is rejected by validation at commit time and would take the whole chunk's commit down with it, so the engine fails that one item instead and leaves the rest of the run intact.

The second row is the one worth understanding, because leaving the cursor alone there would be the more cautious-looking choice and is in fact the damaging one: the item would stay permanently due, and every catch-up run would replay the same empty period indefinitely.

Day of departure rules

Billing on the day a resident departs is handled by the departure process rather than the standard daily cycle. The governing principle is that fees which depend on a government subsidy are not charged for the departure day, because no subsidy is payable for it. Self-funded charges, such as the Basic Daily Fee and a self-funded Daily Accommodation Payment, may still apply.

The full departure sequence, including refund timing and interest, is covered in Exiting a Resident or Recording a Death.