Our practice tries to get paid "upfront" before a procedure is "done". With no procedure "done" it makes it hard to assign a payment to a specific procedure. It has been suggested to treat a prepayment as "unearned" income and treat it in the splits as such. Then, it must be dealt with manually after the procedure is "done".
This need for manual intervention for all these accounts seem crude to me; defeating what we would like OD to do.
Can anyone give me ideas to deal with this? Thanks.
Accrual use of payments
Re: Accrual use of payments
Our office was the one that requested (and paid for) the addition of the unearned income field on paysplits. I agree that there is a lot of manual work that has to be done to maintain this, I wish it was more automated. I do the following to try and track these accounts properly.
1) In addition to picking an unearned income type on the paysplit, I change the billing type (i.e. prepay or refund due).
2) At the end of each month I run a query that compares the unearned income amount to the patient balance - any that don't match I look up and fix as needed. (I can post the query if you like). If the refund was done, I manually clear the refund due unearned income type and then change the biling type back to standard. If part of the prepay balance has been used I have to edit the paysplit amounts to match the credit balance on the account.
3) Then I run the aging report for my standard accounts, checking negative balances only. I go through the entire list and determine if any of those should be considered unearned income and fix the paysplits and change the billing types (so I don't have to look at them again next month).
After all of this is confirmed then I can run my month end reports. This takes me a few hours each month. Perhaps when charges are posted the user could be prompted if they want to adjust the unearned income amounts and they could pick yes or no and have it happen automatically. Being that we paid for this feature, I wish we had been consulted in the design of it. At the time we were just in a hurry to get it implemented before our conversion and I haven't followed up on it since.
1) In addition to picking an unearned income type on the paysplit, I change the billing type (i.e. prepay or refund due).
2) At the end of each month I run a query that compares the unearned income amount to the patient balance - any that don't match I look up and fix as needed. (I can post the query if you like). If the refund was done, I manually clear the refund due unearned income type and then change the biling type back to standard. If part of the prepay balance has been used I have to edit the paysplit amounts to match the credit balance on the account.
3) Then I run the aging report for my standard accounts, checking negative balances only. I go through the entire list and determine if any of those should be considered unearned income and fix the paysplits and change the billing types (so I don't have to look at them again next month).
After all of this is confirmed then I can run my month end reports. This takes me a few hours each month. Perhaps when charges are posted the user could be prompted if they want to adjust the unearned income amounts and they could pick yes or no and have it happen automatically. Being that we paid for this feature, I wish we had been consulted in the design of it. At the time we were just in a hurry to get it implemented before our conversion and I haven't followed up on it since.
Re: Accrual use of payments
I would like to see that query. Yes, please post it.
Ideally, i would love to get a popup telling me how much the patient 'owes". but I don't think i can since there is no procedure "done".
Ideally, i would love to get a popup telling me how much the patient 'owes". but I don't think i can since there is no procedure "done".
Re: Accrual use of payments
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS tmp;
CREATE TABLE tmp SELECT distinct(patient.Guarantor) as Guarantor, sum(paysplit.SplitAmt)*(-1.00) as Split FROM patient RIGHT JOIN paysplit on patient.PatNum=paysplit.PatNum
WHERE paysplit.UnearnedType > 0 GROUP BY patient.Guarantor;
SELECT tmp.Guarantor, tmp.Split, round(patient.BalTotal-patient.InsEst,2) AS 'Balance', definition.ItemName from tmp
LEFT JOIN patient on tmp.Guarantor=patient.patNum
LEFT JOIN definition on patient.BillingType=definition.DefNum
WHERE round(patient.BalTotal-patient.InsEst,2)<>tmp.Split
ORDER BY patient.LName, patient.FName;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS tmp;
CREATE TABLE tmp SELECT distinct(patient.Guarantor) as Guarantor, sum(paysplit.SplitAmt)*(-1.00) as Split FROM patient RIGHT JOIN paysplit on patient.PatNum=paysplit.PatNum
WHERE paysplit.UnearnedType > 0 GROUP BY patient.Guarantor;
SELECT tmp.Guarantor, tmp.Split, round(patient.BalTotal-patient.InsEst,2) AS 'Balance', definition.ItemName from tmp
LEFT JOIN patient on tmp.Guarantor=patient.patNum
LEFT JOIN definition on patient.BillingType=definition.DefNum
WHERE round(patient.BalTotal-patient.InsEst,2)<>tmp.Split
ORDER BY patient.LName, patient.FName;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS tmp;