Personal Billing Overview

PCC has a wide range of tools that help you keep your personal A/R under control. From collecting copays and generating bills, to bill follow-up and sending accounts to collections, PCC tools can make you more productive.

Collecting personal balances can be broken down into these steps:

Collect the Payment and Information at the Time of Service

There is no better time to collect a personal balance than while the patient is still in your office. Use PCC’s Patient Check-In tool to review and update demographic information and policies, review insurance eligibility, review old balances with the family, and post copays and other payments. Everything you collect while the patient is still in the building saves you time and money.

Tip: Have your families review and sign a financial policy that is annually reviewed by your billers, managers, and the owners of your practice. A good financial policy encourages families to remember that they are ultimately responsible for all of their charges.

Generate Bills

Use the Bills tool to generate personal bills. Whether you print and mail your paper bills in the office or send them electronically to a remote printing service, PCC includes numerous features to make your collection process more efficient. You can create custom messages that appear on bills of different aged receivables. You can also review and work on a list of people who need bills before generating them.

Follow Up on Outstanding Bills

At every encounter, your practice can review balances with the family during patient checkin, and go into more detail using the Payments tool. You can also use reporting tools, like The Personal Money Tracking Assistant (persview), to work down old, outstanding personal bills.

Post Payments

Patients and families can pay their bill directly in the patient portal. When you receive a check or a payment through some other method, you can post personal payments and link them to specific charges in the Payments tool in PCC EHR.

Send Accounts to Collections

Turn delinquent accounts over to collections. There are different methods for doing this in PCC, depending on whether you want to leave the outstanding balance on the patient’s account or not. You can adjust off collection charges, or you can pend the balance to the collection agency. Don’t forget to make notes in an account’s history and add appropriate status flag for reporting and tracking.

Here are some related articles in Billing and Practice Management > Bill the Family:

Turn an Account Over to Collections
Learn how to use PCC's tools to turn an account's charges over to a collections agency.
Generate Personal Account Bills
Use the Bills tool in PCC EHR to generate personal bills for families.
Review a Log of Generated Account Bills
Every time you generate a batch of bills, Partner keeps a record in the Bill Log (billlog) program. You can use billlog to review details about your bill batches, find out who received a bill in each bill run, research why a family did not receive a bill, or examine a digital copy of any personal bill.
Customize the Messages on Personal Bills
When you prepare and send personal bills, you can include a billing message customizable to the age of the balances on each family's account. Messages will appear on bills you print at your practice or send to an electronic billing service for printing.
Use Cycle Billing
Your practice can use automatic cycle billing to spread your bills out throughout a month or other period of time. With cycle billing, your revenue and billing workload will stretch throughout the month, and no family will accidentally receive more than one bill per cycle.
Follow Up on Unpaid Family Bills Overview
Unfortunately, not every family pays their bills on time. An address may be incorrect, a family may have questions about their balance, or they may be unable to pay. Following up on outstanding bills is a vital part of the billing process.
Review What Appeared on a Printed Bill
How can you review a copy of an account's bill to verify what was sent to them on their statement? When your PCC system generates a bill, either for printing by a third-party printing service or in your office, it keeps a copy of the bill's contents.
Provide Good Faith Estimates for Pediatric Encounters
If a family does not have insurance, or the family won’t be using insurance for an encounter, then a pediatric practices needs to provide a “Good Faith Estimate” for the cost of care when an encounter is scheduled more than 3 days in advance.
Enter and Review Account Notes
You may wish to record details about an account or billing situation with a family. Read below to learn about Account Notes in PCC.
Enter and Review Account Notes
Learn how to enter and review account notes in PCC EHR.
Generate Personal Account Bills
Use the Bills tool in PCC EHR to generate personal statements. In PCC EHR, you can send your bills to a third party electronically or print them in-house and mail them to families.

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