Surgical Assistant Billing Guide
5. Keeping Track of Your Accounts
It is essential to keep track of invoices sent and payments received to ensure you have been paid by all debtors. The following guide is intended for those surgical assistants that do not already have a system for keeping track of their accounts.
The system you choose will depend on how much assisting work you do and whether you are more comfortable using a computerised or a paper-based system.
Paper-Based Account-Keeping
A common approach would be to print two copies of each invoice: one goes to the payer of the account and one is for your file. A filing cabinet or filing box can be used to store your copies; the outstanding invoices can be filed alphabetically by patient name if you usually bill the patient directly or by health fund if you usually use Gap Cover. When you receive a payment you find the appropriate invoice and mark it as paid. It makes sense to then store the paid invoices in a different file. Also, if you keep a record of the payments in a ledger as you go it will make things easy at tax time.
It is important to periodically go through your outstanding invoices file to check which accounts have not been paid in a timely fashion. You can mark accounts with a due date in such a way that it is easy to see which accounts are overdue while thumbing through them.
Advantages
- Easy and cheap to set up
- Easy to use, requires no technical knowledge
Disadvantages
- Cumbersome if sending out more than a few accounts per week
- More difficult to detect overdue accounts
- Requires the physical space of a filing cabinet or box
Computer-Based Account-Keeping
There are numerous medical billing and administration, or practice management, software solutions available on the market. However, most of these are expensive and lend themselves to the running of a fully-fledged medical practice.
Many surgical assistants do not require this level of sophistication to keep track of their accounts. Instead, one of the many generic small business software packages, such as the Quicken and MYOB products, will suffice to generate invoices and track accounts. You can use EasyAssist to calculate your item no. and fees and enter this information directly into this type of software.
Advantages
- Scales to a large number of accounts for assistants who do a lot of assisting
- Easy to sort through accounts by patient name, health fund, surgeon or other any parameter connected to the account
- Easy to bring up a list of outstanding/overdue accounts
Disadvantages
- Can be time-consuming to set up
- May be a steep learning curve initially
- Requires appropriate hardware, i.e. a computer and printer