The first thing you should do is determine how much time each account takes you a week/month. Once you know how much time it takes, divide the amount you receive by the number of hours. That is your hourly rate. Now you have to consider how much you need to make an hour to cover your expenses. For example, for us an hourly employee may make between $13-23 per hour, but it costs us between $20-40 per hour with payroll taxes, disability, workers' comp, unemployment, ect. Then we have the cost of having that employee in the building, rent, heat, computer costs, printing, supplies, software, etc. So for us we need to make between $75-100 per hour to be profitable. Some accounts are more than that, some are less. It evens out. But if you determine an account is not profitable, then you need to look at what you can do to make it profitable. For example, can you get more payments coming as ERAs? Can you cut down on time anywhere? We have had situations where the provider is bad about getting us the eobs. That made the account unprofitable because we spent too much time chasing down payments that he got. So we signed him up for as many ERAs as we could. Problem solved, well mostly. But it helped tremendously. Another situation, a provider bills 3 - 4 procedures on every claim. To cut down on key strokes we made each procedure a 1 digit code so the entry time is cut way down. There are usually things you can do to cut down the time an account takes. We are always looking for things we can do to tighten up.
It's important to know your numbers. You can't know where your business is without that. Keep work logs and document how long you (or your employees) are spending in each account. We have had some employees get annoyed with us. We are not using it to check up on them, but to make sure the account is working. If it doesn't work both ways, it isn't working.
