The Collection Report (coll)

The Collection Report (coll) explains an account’s current balance and recent payment history. If a family does not understand why they owe money, run coll. The report can also help you determine whether or not an account has been making regular payments against their outstanding balance.

After your review the details, the report can be sent to the screen, printer, or to email.

Run the Collection Report and Select Criteria

You can run coll for a particular account by pressing F3 – Collection Report while in the Family Editor (fame) for that account.

You can also access coll from a command prompt by typing coll and then pressing Enter.

If you start coll from a command prompt, you will be asked to select an account to report on, and then coll will display the criteria selection screen. If you start it from within fame, then it already knows which account to report on and therefore displays the criteria screen immediately.

On the criteria screen, you can make selections to change the report output.

• You can determine whether you want the output on your screen, in your e-mail, printed out, or used interactively on the screen.
• You can choose to include only certain sections of the report using the “Include on the Report” checkboxes shown.
• Finally, since the report can show you all recent personal payments, you can change the date range of payments the report will display.

Press F1 – Process Report to create the report.

How to Read the coll Report Output

The complete coll report has four optional levels of detail: Account Aging, Outstanding Charges, Recent Personal Payments and Demographic Information. You can include any or all of these sections. To include a section, make sure that it is marked with an ‘X’ on the criteria screen before you generate the report.

When you generate the report, it will appear in the following order:

• Account Info: The first section of the report contains simple demographic information, including the account name, address and phone numbers, as well as some key dates (date of last visit, last bill sent, last personal payment made, and last insurance payment made.) If you use the “Hold Bill Till” and “Budget Amount” functions of the Family Editor (fame), you will see information about those settings in this section of the report.

  
  The Account Info section of coll is customizable. If you need to format your coll report to suite the needs of your practice, contact PCC for help creating a custom header.

• Aging Summaries: The coll report shows you different ways of aging an account’s outstanding personal charges. Balances are first aged by Payor Responsibility Date, and then by Transaction Date.
  
  Payor Responsibility is different in that it will age items based on when the amount became personal, instead of aging strictly from the date of service. Within each category, amounts are shown for balances that are overdue 30, 60, 90, and 120 days.

• Outstanding Charges: The report contains a list of currently unpaid, personal charges. This section makes it especially easy to explain an account’s balance to someone over the phone.
  
  Each unpaid charge includes the patient’s name, the diagnoses and procedures of the visit, and three columns to indicate how much was originally charged, how much is due to the personal account, and how much is still pending an insurance company.

• Totals, Recent Payments, and Summary: At the bottom of the coll report, you can see the total of unpaid charges along with a summary of recent payments.
  
  Use this information to determine the total amounts owed and to see whether or not an account has been making regular payments. (Accounts that are working to pay off an old balance should show regular payments.