2. Generate Personal Bills (bills, ebs)
The bills program generates personal bills for your accounts quickly and efficiently. It has many configurable options and can be run in several different ways. From within the bills program you can also add a customized billing message to your bills and review the list of bills waiting to be generated.
If you print your bills on paper and mail them in-house, you run the bills program. If you have Partner send your personal bills out electronically, printed and mailed by a third party, you use the ebills (ebs) program. Both of these programs work the same way.
 | PCC encourages all clients to explore the electronic billing option. When printing, packaging, and mailing costs are considered, many practices discover that electronic billing saves both time and money while producing bills of a more professional quality. |
2.1. Sending Bills
Follow this procedure to print or generate the outstanding bills for your office:
Run Bills
Select bills or ebs from the "Personal Billing" section of the "Billing Functions" window in Partner's windows. You can also type bills or ebs at a command prompt.
Press [F1 -- Make Changes]
When you first run bills or ebs, you will see the settings that were used the last time you ran the program. Press F1 to make changes.
Update the "End" Date
Change the "End" date so it indicates today's date. Otherwise, your bills will not take into account the most recent charges and payments. The start date will indicate how far back you wish to display detail about the account's balance. Anything prior to that date will appear on the bill as a "Previous Balance."
Optional: Add Other Bill Criteria
If you wish, use the other fields on the screen to limit what bills will be generated. See the section below, Your Office's Billing Cycle, for more details.
Press [F1 -- Save Changes]
Press [F2 -- Prepare Bills]
Partner will gather charge and payment information and prepare the bills. This may take a while, as Partner must review the balances for all outstanding accounts.
Optional: Review Results
When you are returned to the billing screen, you will see a "Messages" section on the bottom telling you how many bills are in the batch waiting to be generated:
If you wish, press [F7 -- Show BillList] to review what families are waiting in this current batch of bills. Read the section below entitled Review Accounts With Bills for more information.
If you leave the bills program to work on those accounts, remember to press [F1 -- Make Changes], save, and press [F2 -- Prepare Bills] to re-prepare the bills when you return. Repeating those steps ensures that any changes you made to account balances are reflected in the bills you generate. If you don't re-prepare, you will print the same batch of bills you originally prepared.
Press [F3 -- Print Bills]
When you are ready to generate your bills, press [F3 -- Print Bills]. If you are running ebs for electronic bills, press [F3 -- Submit Bills].
Function Keys in bills and ebs
- [F1 -- Make Changes]
Press [F1] to change items on the main bills screen. You should always change the end date.
- [F2 -- Prepare Bills]
Press [F2] to prepare a batch of bills based on the screen criteria.
- [F3 -- Print Bills/Submit Bills]
Press [F3] to print or send your bills electronically, depending on the program you are running. This function is only available once you ahve prepared a batch of bills.
- [F5 -- Print One Bill]
Press [F5] to print a single bill for a single account.
- [F6 -- Edit Bill Msg]
Press [F6] to review or change your batch billing messages. See below for more information.
- [F7 -- Show BillList]
Press [F7] to display a list of everyone currently prepared to receive a bill. See Review Accounts With Bills for more information.
- [F8 -- Discard Changes]
While making changes to the bill criteria, press [F8] to discard your changes and return to the main bills screen.
2.2. Print One Bill
In addition to the "batch" bill printing described above, you can also generate a single bill for any family:
Press [F5 -- Print One Bill].
Find the family needing a bill. See Finding Patients and Accounts to learn more.
Enter a date range for the bill.
Press [F1 -- Print Bills] to print the bill.
2.3. Your Office's Billing Cycle: Sending Some Bills
Maybe your office prints current (or "normal") bills on the first of the month and overdue bills on the fifteenth. Maybe you print bills weekly based on the family's last name. Maybe you print bills weekly and have Partner automatically find every account with a balance that has not received a bill in 30 days. These are all different types of cycle billing.
You can control your billing cycle manually or automatically.
Manual Cycle Billing. You can manually control your billing cycle by changing the criteria options on the bills screen. Using the criteria options, you can limit: the age of bills to print, what zip codes will print, or what part of the alphabet will print. For example, perhaps you send "Normal" bills at the first of the month using the ebs program, and then you run bills the following week to print all overdue bills in-house. You could do this by changing the "Normal?" and "Overdue...?" questions on the bills and ebs screens.
Similarly, you can control your billing cycle manually by printing a certain zip code or alphabet range at different times during the month. Set all of these options when you press [F1 -- Make Changes] before preparing your bills.
Automatic Cycle Billing. The other way to control your billing cycle is to let Partner calculate which families should get a bill. Once you tell Partner how often an overdue account should receive a bill (28 days, for example), you can run your bills every day (or at any interval) and everyone who is due for a bill will receive one.
Activating an automatic billing cycle and running bills weekly (for example) can lead to faster and more efficient collections. Accounts will receive a bill within a week of their visit and they will never accidentally receive more than one bill within a cycle. An added advantage is that your billing workload and income from personal bills will be evenly divided throughout the month (or whatever your cycle length).
First, set how often you would like families with balances to receive a bill (every 28 days, for example). PCC can help set this up for you, or you can change it yourself in the Personal Billing section of the Configuration Editor (ced):
Once automatic cycle billing is turned on, run bills weekly (or at any interval shorter than the cycle) for all families and all ranges. Partner will check all outstanding balances and only generate a bill if the family has not received a bill for 28 days (or if they have new charges).
2.4. Review Accounts With Bills (billlist)
After preparing your bills, you might press [F7 -- Bill List] to review the list of every account about to get a bill. This report, which can be sent to the screen or a printer, lists accounts grouped by billing category.
To use billlist successfully, you must consider when you are running it. If you run billlist before you prepare your bills, the list will be empty (or outdated). If you print billlist, make changes to the accounts, and then reprepare your bills, the list you printed will be out of date. Finally, if you wait until after you print bills, your list will be blank because no accounts will need bills. For these reasons, you should follow this procedure:
Set Billing Criteria
Press [F1 -- Make Changes] and update the "End" date as described in the bills section above.
Press [F2 -- Prepare Bills]
There will be a pause as Partner prepares the bills.
Press [F7 -- Bill List] to Review the Accounts
You will be asked if you want the list sent to your screen or to the printer.
Once you have the list, you can exit the bills program and make changes to various accounts or write off faulty balances. Remember to repeat the steps above to re-prepare your bills when you return.
Press [F3 -- Print Bills].
Here is a sample billlist report:
2.5. Customizing Your Billing Messages (billmsg)
2.5.1. What is a Billing Message?
A billing message is a brief note that appears on a personal bill. Both paper and electronic bills can include a customized billing message. You can enter a family-specific billing message on the notes page of the Family Editor (fame). You can also use the billmsg program to change the billing messages that appear on all of your Normal, 30, 60, 90 and 120-day bills. Here are a few examples of messages that offices use:
New Provider: "We would like to welcome Dr. Smith to our practice!"
Open House: "Come see our new facilities at 10 Main St. from 9am-4pm."
Credit Card Payments: "We now accept VISA card payments."
In addition to these general messages, you can design messages specific to each billing category. For example:
Current: "Thank you for your patronage."
Overdue 30: "Payment is now past due. Please send payment promptly."
Overdue 60: "Failure to pay balance due in full may result in termination."
Overdue 90: "Your account is about to be sent to collection."
Overdue 120: "Your account has been sent to collection."
When you print your bills, the appropriate bill message will print automatically. If a category doesn't have a specific message, then a default message will be used instead (if it exists).
| The Normal-30-60-90-120 day batch billing messages will appear in addition to the personal billing messages stored in fame. |
2.5.2. Changing Your Billing Messages
You can review, delete, add, or change any of your billing messages through the billmsg program. The messages themselves are stored in separate files on your system, and this program allows easy access to those files.
Press [F6 -- Bill Message] to run the billmsg program. You can also type billmsg at a command prompt.
When you start billmsg, you will be presented with a list of choices:
Use the arrow keys to make your selection and press Enter. If a billing message for your selection currently exists, it will be displayed at the top of your screen and you will be given options to change it or keep it. If the message you selected has never been configured, you will be offered the chance to create it.
Whenever you make changes, billmsg will ask you to confirm that you want to over-write the old message with the new one.
2.6. Checking Past Billing Runs (billlog)
Every time you generate a batch of bills, your system records how and when you ran them in the billlog. You can use the billlog program to find out when you last ran a batch of personal bills and which categories or groups of accounts were included in that batch.
billlog can be very useful if you manually cycle your bills using the aging categories, the alphabet, or a range of zipcodes. If you are worried about missing a week's worth of bills, or if you want to double-check that you remembered to update the end-date for a bill run, you can find out in the billlog.
You can run the billlog program inside the "Personal Billing" window in the "Billing Functions" window of Partner. You can also run it from a command prompt by typing billlog.
| While viewing the billlog, or any report that uses the less program, type shift-G to quickly drop to the bottom of the report where the most recent events are recorded. You can also use the Page Up and Page Down keys. |
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On Thu Apr 26 10:16:49 EST 2004
A billing run for the period 01/01/80 to 04/25/04
for the alphabetic range t to z
for the zip codes from 00000 through 99999
for normal, overdue 30, overdue 60, overdue 90, and overdue 120 days bills
On Wed May 9 10:20:48 EDT 2004
A billing run for the period 01/01/80 to 05/08/04
for the alphabetic range a to f
for the zip codes from 00000 through 99999
for normal, overdue 30, overdue 60, overdue 90, and overdue 120 days bills |
In the above example, you can see the date and time that the bills were generated as well as the selection criteria used. The example shown uses an alphabet range to break up the bills. Notice that there is no entry for the alphabetical range of "g to s", indicating that this cycle may have been forgotten.