Use Budget Payment Plans and Hold Bills to Work With Non-Paying Accounts

As you work with families on outstanding balances, your practice may make an arrangement for a family to pay a certain amount each month or agree upon a future date when they will be billed. Additionally, your practice may want to prevent billing of a family for another reason, such as when dealing with newborn charges and insurance enrollment.

Use PCC EHR’s “Hold Bill Until” and “Budget Amount” fields, along with account status flags, to modify when a family will be billed and whether or not they will see a budget amount on their statement.

Contents

1 Work with Accounts and Add Payment Plan Details
2 Hold Bill Until
3 Budget Amount
4 Use Status Flags to Manage Budget Accounts
5 Stop Bills for a Family
6 Other Personal A/R Resources for Non-Paying Accounts

Work with Accounts and Add Payment Plan Details

Read the procedure below to learn how to identify accounts that need a special billing arrangement, work with the family, and update their records with payment plan information.

Find Accounts with Unpaid Personal Balances

Use the Personal Balances tool to work down personal A/R and identify accounts you wish to contact.

You can use the criteria in Personal Balances to focus on families with a particular balance amount above a certain age, for example. Read Work Personal Balances to learn more about the Personal Balances tool.

Identify and Open an Account

Use the Personal Balances worklist to identify a specific account to place on a payment plan of some kind. You can use the columns to sort the list by various values.

When you have identified an account, double-click to open it (or select the account and click “Open Account”).

Contact the Family, Make a Plan, and Enter Notes

Use the details in the Payments window to contact the family, review outstanding balances, and make a plan with the family.

Enter an account note detailing any decisions.

Add a Hold Bill Until Date

If your practice will delay the next bill until a certain date, enter a Hold Bill Until date.

Adding a date to the Hold Bill Until field will prevent batch bill runs, performed through the Bills tool, from generating a bill for the family until the day after the specified date. For more details, see below.

Add a Budget Amount

If the family has agreed to pay a certain amount during each bill cycle, enter that amount in the “Budget Amount” field.

When a family has a budget amount, the printed statement will include a line of text indicating the budget amount. Both the statement and the Patient Portal will also still display the full amount due. For more details, see below.

Add Account Flag(s)

Your practice can use one or more account status flags to track and report on accounts with a payment plan or special billing arrangement.

An account status flag allows you to include and exclude accounts from specific reports and worklists.

Read below to learn more about status flags for both reporting and blocking personal bills.

Follow Up on Accounts with Special Billing Arrangements

Use the Personal Balances tool to create lists of accounts on budget plans or who have other account statuses. For example, you can use Personal Balances to create a worklist of all families with the “Budget” status flag.

Update Hold Bill Until, Budget Amounts, and Account Flags When Families Pay

As families pay down their balances, you can adjust the Hold Bill Until date, Budget Amount, and Account Flags to keep your records up-to-date and resume normal billing for the family when appropriate. Add an account note to help your practice track the ongoing changes to a family’s billing status.

Hold Bill Until

Giving an account a “Hold Bill Until” date prevents batch bill runs, performed through the Bills tool, from generating a bill for the family.

The date is inclusive, which means that if you wish to start sending the family bills on November 1st, you should enter a Hold Bill Until date of October 31st.

When they have a Hold Bill Until date, families will still see their full outstanding balance in the Patient Portal and they can pay their balance at any time. Your practice can also still manually generate a single bill for the family in the Payments tool.

Do You Use 'Hold Bill Until' for Newborns?: Some practices use the Hold Bill Until feature for families with a newborn, delaying personal bills for a month, to provide time for insurance enrollment. Other practices delay posting these charges entirely. Other practices post the charges and allow them to appear on the family’s bill, as the charges are their responsibility, but they may also send a form letter explaining that insurance reimbursement is still pending the child’s enrollment. This might help a family take action if the patient has not yet been added to their policy.

What About Bills Generated in Personal Balances?: If your practice or billing services generates batches of bills through the Personal Balances tool instead of the Bills tool, then you are pushing bills out regardless of the Hold Bill Until date. You should use the criteria in Personal Balances to exclude families with a specific flag if you do not wish to print bills for them.

Budget Amount

When a family has a budget amount, both the printed statement and the Patient Portal will still show the full amount due to the account.

The printed bill will display an additional line in bold text, indicating the family’s budget amount. For example, “Budget Amount: $ 100.00“.

Use Status Flags to Manage Budget Accounts

You can use account status flags to make it easier to identify families in reports and the Personal Balances tool.

For example, by adding a “Payment Plan” or “Budget” status flag, your practice can use Personal Balances to create a worklist of all accounts with a special billing arrangement.

You could also exclude families with a particular status flag, if you use Personal Balances to print personal statements.

As families pay down their balance, it is important to review the accounts and update flags to match the account’s new status.

Stop Bills for a Family

In addition to the Hold Bill Until field, your practice can use a custom status flag to prevent bills being generated for the family.

First, use the Tables tool to review and update the Account Flags on your system.

When you edit a flag, you can set whether or not a flag should stop bills for the account.

When bills are generated in the Bills tool, families with a flag that holds bills will not receive a bill. Your practice can still manually generate an up-to-date statement for any account, regardless of their status, in the Payments tool.

As always, remember to review and update account flags when a family’s situation changes.

Other Personal A/R Resources for Non-Paying Accounts

In addition to arranging a payment plan and holding bills so you can work with a family directly, PCC EHR includes other features to help manage families with overdue, unpaid balances.

Custom Reminder Notes and Letters

Your practice can automatically include custom notes on bills and optionally generate billing reminder letters based on the age of the balance.

To learn more, see Customize the Messages on Personal Bills and Work Personal Balances.

Automatically Charge a Late Billing Fee

Your practice can configure an automatic late billing fee, based on amount due and other custom criteria.

See Automatically Charge Billing Fees for Overdue Accounts to learn more.

Turn an Account Over to Collections

If your practice needs to send a family to collections, there are several workflows you can use to track the process and its result. See Turn an Account Over to Collections to learn more.

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