Consultants have said that a healthy practice should collect 98% of adjusted production. Letting an account become more than 30 days overdue will cripple your cash flow and require you to invest more time and money into the account as you try to collect. The less time a patient’s account balance has been outstanding, the easier it is to collect the balance from the patient. You can use the Collections Manager to find patients with overdue balances so you can collect the balance in a timely manner.
The Collections Manager has been designed to help increase your practice’s revenue by decreasing your account receivables. The Collections Manager allows you to access a list of accounts based on filter criteria, such as account aging, insurance claim status or last payment date.
To generate a list from the Collections Manager:
- In the Office Manager, click the Collections Manager button to open the Collections Manager View.
- In the Collections Manager View, set the desired filter criteria to narrow the results of the list you generate:
- Under Select Guarantor, set a range of guarantors to include on the list.
- Under Select Provider, select a range of providers to include, or select All.
- Under Select Billing Type, select a range of billing types to include, or select All.
- Check Skip Accounts with Claims Pending to exclude all patients with an outstanding claim in their Ledger.
- Under Select # of Pmts Missed, select an option to only include account who have missed a certain number of payments towards their payment agreement.
- Under Minimum Days Past Due, select an option to only include accounts based on their oldest aged balance.
- Under Ins Min Days Past Due, select an option to only include accounts based on the age of outstanding insurance claims.
- Under For Payment Agreement (PA) & Future Due Payment Plans (FD), select an option to include/exclude accounts with or without a payment agreement of future due payment plan, or select All.
- Under Min Balance, enter a dollar amount. Accounts with balances under the amount you enter won’t appear on the list.
- Check Last Pmt Before and enter a date. Guarantors who have made a payment after the date entered will be excluded from the list.
- Check If Not Billed Since and enter a date. Accounts who have received a billing statement after the date entered will be excluded from the list.
- Check Last Visit Before and enter a date. Patients who have had an appointment after the date entered will be excluded from the list.
- Check Previous OJ Entry Before and enter a date. Guarantors who have a manual entry in the Office Journal after the date entered will be excluded from the list.
- Click OK to generate the list.
Unlike a typical report, the Collections Manager is an interactive module. You can highlight a patient in the Collections Manager and click the More Info button to view balance information and contact information for that patient. And, from the Collections Manager, you can generate a letter or send an email message, or access a patient’s continuing care.
Once you’ve contacted the patient you can easily make notes in the Office Journal about the contact, add or update guarantor or billing statement notes for the account to remind the patient of actions you’ve agreed upon, set up a payment agreement, or change an account’s billing type.
