If you own a healthcare or medical practice, you’re aware of the complexities involved in financial recordkeeping for businesses in your industry. The typical bookkeeper might not have the expertise to provide insight into the financial health of your practice. In addition, your bookkeeper might often be late or unable to deliver all the financial information your CPA or board of directors requests.
Supporting Strategies is here to help. As your outsourced bookkeeper and controller, our skilled, experienced U.S.-based professionals use secure, best-of-breed technology and proven processes to deliver a back-office solution that will offer in-depth financial insight into your medical practice.
By working with Supporting Strategies, you’ll have a high-level, cost-effective, long-term solution for your bookkeeping and back-office needs. As a result, you can focus on what you do best: caring for patients.
Get your vitals right
Doing well by your patients can be hard enough — without adding back-office functions into the mix. Paying taxes, for example, can be stressful for medical practices accustomed to a high volume of paperwork from both clients and insurance companies. The right bookkeeping partner will streamline operations by determining data and documentation needs for your CPA, establishing an efficient reporting system, and consistently delivering the needed information on time.
Manage the financial health of your clinic
Given the complexities of running a successful healthcare practice, it’s important to put the right processes in place to ensure that you’re making data-driven decisions about payor mix (whether to continue contracting with a particular insurance); staffing; service line/procedure profitability; reasonable compensation (if structured as an S corporation); and compliance with partnership agreements/bonuses.
Reduce lost revenue and enhance cash flow
Medical practices grapple with a number of billing issues that are specific to them — including a collection cycle that is 60 days out. Complex billing codes and the lag time involved with insurance reimbursements make this longer cash flow cycle a reality.
This can lead to cash-flow problems quickly, making it critical for you to have an efficient way of knowing what has been collected, what hasn’t, and why. There are real implications for not tracking account activity after a bill goes out; for example, if you fail to resubmit a claim that had originally been submitted with the incorrect diagnostic code, it will become uncollectible after a certain period of time.
You should aim to regularly check the gap between accounts receivable and accounts payable — ideally at the end of every month. You’ll want to review billing reports to understand what has been billed, what has been paid to date, and what remains outstanding.
Beyond what happens within the 60-day billing cycle, you’ll benefit from an accounts receivable aging report, which identifies accounts that are more than 90 days old. A regular appointment to review this will help you know what your most urgent collection needs are.
Keep your oversight team informed
If your healthcare practice has a board or other governing body, you need to be in a position to provide the information necessary for making strategic business decisions. Your board may request non-standard financial reports, such as the number of days that a patient invoice is outstanding before it is collected. There may also be need for a breakdown of revenue and/or receivables by payor type (i.e. Medicare or Blue Cross). Lastly, you may need to make forecasts about cash flow — a crucial step, since collections often delay financial inflow.
Prescribe a long-term, team-based solution
Although it can be cost-effective and comforting to put one person in place for billing issues — a centralized resource who knows it all — the intricacies of managing cash flow in the healthcare industry call for a team-based solution. If a team member gets sick, becomes unavailable, or leaves your clinic, you’ll be in a much better position to continue managing monthly financial inflow and outflow if you adopt a team-based approach. This will also be an advantage as your practice experiences growth.
Allow your focus to remain on patients
Chances are, you entered the medical field to help people – but once you’re running a healthcare clinic or medical practice, that goal must compete with the day-to-day operations that make your work possible. By hiring a professional bookkeeping partner with expertise in the healthcare industry, you will ensure that your patients will get the focused, attentive care they are counting on.
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