How do you keep up with what you billed for versus what you didnt when you have many come in from diff payers? Any advice???
Without you being more specific, the words in bold could be interpreted as
what you billed your client for your services, or
what you billed the insurance companies for on behalf of your client. I'm going to answer as tho you meant the second interpretation - what you billed the insurance companies for. If that is not what you asked for, the following may be boring/irrelevant.
We do percentage billing. We bill our clients for a percentage of
what is collected from the insurance companies (our percentage charge to our clients is multiplied times what is collected, not times the amount that was billed). We bill our clients that same percentage for what we collect from the patients by billing them (patient statements). We bill our clients a lower percentage of monies collected when the patient pays cash for the date of service and we do not have to bill the patient or the insurance company (we still have to pay our worker-bees to post the cash payments to our billing software, hence the fee for this, but lower).
In our billing software, we can establish financial classes and assign these to payments as they are posted. At a minimum, we have Insurance Payment, Patient Payment, and Cash. Each payment posted to the software is assigned to one of these financial classes. And the payments are posted to the software with Date = Date of Posting rather then Date of Service. This allows us to track the payments that we post in a given month.
Edit: Note that the insurance carrier's name is attached to all monies billed to it, per patient, in our billing software. With a couple of clicks when can print a report that shows all money billed to and paid by each insurance carrier billed - on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. We can also print a list of all patients, with all carriers which that patient has used over the years. This report also shows all monies billed to and paid by the insurance carriers - but it is broken out by patient, not by insurance carrier.
We have an Aging Report that came with the software, plus custom reports that I have designed. These reports make it easy to track monies that have been billed to the insurance companies and not yet paid. After a certain amount of time, we contact the insurance companies to see why they haven't paid (too often we discover that they have paid and the client has not yet passed the EOB to us to post, but that is a different subject.) Our software also allows us to set a flag that says "print all patient statements that haven't been printed in the last 'x' amount of time". If the patient has a zero balance, no statement is generated. If the patient has a positive balance, he will get a statement every 'x' period of time based on how we have the flag set, regardless of how often we print statements. That is, the patient won't get a statement every time we print statements; just after 'x' period of time has passed.
At the beginning of the month, we click a couple of buttons in the software and get a report of payments posted the previous month (regardless of when the date of service was). The report is separated into Insurance Payments, Patient Payments, Cash Payments, and Total Payments. I have an invoice template set up in Excel for each of our clients - with, among other things, a field for cash payments, regular payments (insurance and patient both included in this field, since they are both charged the same percentage), and total payments. I type the total payments for the previous month into the total payments field, the cash payments into the cash payment field. And I have a formula in the regular payments field that subtracts the cash payments field from the total payments field to give/display the regular payments for the previous month in that field. The amounts due us are calculated by formula also - for the regular payment field and the cash payment field.
For each new invoice - I make a copy of the previous month's invoice and rename it, change the Invoice Number and Dates, change the dollar amounts to reflect the correct numbers for the month which that invoice is billing for, and print it out. At the top of the invoice, I show the date on the previous invoice and the dollar amount billed. I show the date of payment and the amount of payment. If payment was not 100%, there will be a balance still owed. That balance shows up in the list of charges that are on the invoice, and the list is totalled at the bottom of the invoice. That is, any monies not paid on previous invoices are carried forward on the current invoice and show up in the totals.
There are other charges on the invoice because we also provide services for which we charge a flat fee. All charges are presented in categories - with the totals for each category displayed on the right side of the invoice - including previous monies billed and not paid. This column of subtotals is totalled at the bottom of the invoice - so the client can see the total of what s/he owes, but can also see the subtotals of each category of charge that make up the grand total.
Like Linda, it only takes a couple of minutes to print out the monthly payments posted from the billing software, prepare the invoice, and print it. Maybe less time than it takes you to read this explanation. If you take the time to establish a good process in the beginning (which includes setting up all of your accounts properly in the billing software when you first begin to us it), you can carry out your business with a minimum of effort. Establishing a good process in the beginning allows you to be both efficient and effective in carrying out your business.
