Personal Billing Overview

From collecting copays to generating bills, to bill follow-up and sending accounts to collections, PCC tools can help you keep your practice’s personal A/R under control.

Here’s an overview:

Collect the Payment and Family 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, explain old balances to the family, and post copays and other payments. Everything you collect while the patient is still in the building saves you time and money.

Financial Policy: 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 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 work down a list of accounts with personal balances using the Personal Balances tool.

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 enter account notes and add appropriate status flags 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. Use the Payments tool to print a single account statement.
Review a Log of Generated Account Bills
Every time your practice generates a batch of bills, PCC keeps a log of the bill run. Use the Log tab of the Bills tool to review each bill run, including full details of who ran bills, when they were run, and a list of every account for whom a bill was generated or excluded. You can also review a copy of any bill.
Customize the Messages on Personal Bills
Account bills include a text area that displays a custom billing message from your practice. You can adjust the billing message that appears for bills printed by a third-party service and bills you print at your office. You can add a one-time note when you print a single bill at your practice. Additionally, PCC support can add a custom “Pay Your Bill” website address.
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.
Explain Account Balances
Use the Account Balances component to review account balance totals and the details of all charges with a personal amount due.
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.
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.
Print a Single Account Statement
Learn how to print a single account statement at any time, right in your office.
Work Personal Balances
The Personal Balances tool allows multiple users to review and work down a list of accounts and mark each as reviewed before moving to the next item on the worklist.
Review a Family’s Account History
When you need to troubleshoot a billing issue for an account, or a family asks for an annual account record, use the Account History in the patient's chart.
Work Personal Balances
When you need to find accounts with outstanding personal balances, create a worklist in the Personal Balances tool.

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