Discover three common challenges practices face when it comes to collecting balances and learn how QuickBill Email can help.
Updated 1/11/22
Maintaining a healthy cash flow is fundamental to keeping your practice open and functioning well, and timely collections is a big part of that. But staying on top of collections is often easier said than done.
There are three big challenges practices face when it comes to collecting balances. Do any of these scenarios sound familiar to you?
- You often write off small patient balances because it’s not worth the time or expense to collect them.
- You’re dealing with staffing shortages and don’t have extra people or time to dedicate to collections.
- You can’t reach patients during business hours to talk to them about their balances and are tired of leaving voicemails.
If you’re facing any of those challenges right now, don’t worry. QuickBill Email can help!
Watch the webinar recording titled, Increase Your Collections without Increasing Your Workload to
learn more about how to use QuickBill Email.
QuickBill Email (available as an add-on to Dentrix G7.4 and higher) gives you tools to increase your collections without hiring more team members or asking more of the team members you have. It also gives your practice a way to meet your patients’ needs and expectations for digital billing and online payments.
Challenge 1- You often write off small patient balances because it’s not worth the time or expense to collect them.
It’s common for patients to end up with a balance of $5 or $10 after insurance has paid. Insurance coverage estimates are just that—estimates. And even if patients pay at time of service, they may still end up with a small balance when insurance has finally paid their portion.
When you’re faced with a $5 balance, how much effort do you put into trying to collect it? It may not be worth the time and expense of printing and mailing a billing statement to collect that small of an amount, so you may just end up writing it off. But several small amounts add up, and you could be writing off hundreds of dollars.
When you send patients a statement by email, you don’t have the overhead costs of printing and mailing. You can bill for the small amounts you normally would have written off, and those small amounts will add up in your favor.
To send billing statement emails for small amounts (or even for large amounts), you need to set up a couple of options when you generate your billing statements.
- Move the Balance Forward Date back a few months so that patients can see a history of their treatment, any payments they made, and insurance payments. The more information they have the better they will understand where their balance is coming from.
- Make sure the Minimum Balance to Bill is set to the lowest amount you want to collect. That may have been set at $10 or $20 in the past, but you can set it to $.01 to bill for any amount patients owe you.
Watch this video to learn more about the billing statement options in Dentrix.
Challenge 2- You’re dealing with staffing shortages and don’t have extra people or time to dedicate to collections.
Right now many business are facing employee shortages, and dental offices are not immune to that problem. If you have fewer team members trying to do more with their time, you need a way to collect more without overburdening your already busy team!
It’s easy to work efficiently when you process a batch of statements to send through QuickBill Email because you can take care of all your billing verification tasks all from one window. You can choose which statements you want to send, select how patients want to receive their statements, correct email addresses and birthdates, and add statement notes all from the same screen in Dentrix. You don’t have to waste time searching for patients or clicking around several different windows.
To enable statement verification in the Office Manager, click Maintenance > Practice Setup > Preferences, and then click the Print Options tab. Enable the Verify Billing Statements to Send option.
While you’re at it, enable the Copy Billing Statements to Document Center option too. That way a copy of the statement you email to patients will be added to each guarantor’s Document Center so that you’ve got a record of exactly what was billed.
Watch this video to learn more about verifying and sending billing statements electronically.
QuickBill Email also helps you save time when it comes to checking on the status of your statements.
Instead of opening individual patient accounts to check on their payments or generating reports and trying to find specific names, you can see who received a billing statement email from the submission history window. From there you can see if the patient opened the statement email, if they viewed their statement, and if they paid their balance.
Read this tip to learn more about QuickBill Email statuses.
Challenge 3- You can’t reach patients during business hours to talk to them about their balances and are tired of leaving voicemails.
Patients are busy, and they either can’t or don’t want to receive calls from your office during business hours. It’s hard to get patients to answer the phone, and your team members don’t have time to spend hours leaving voicemails that will go unanswered.
Instead of spending time calling on balances, use QuickBill Email to send patients email billing statements with a link to pay their balance online. Patients can check their email anytime, anywhere, and they can make their payments when it’s convenient for them.
These days patients expect to receive an electronic bill and to be able to pay it online. That’s the way they handle their mortgage and utility bills, so that’s the way they want to receive their dental bills as well. The easier it is for patients to pay, the better the chance they will pay.
When patients receive an email billing statement through QuickBill Email, they can see the amount due. From there they can click View E-Statement to see their full billing statement with all of the details. They can then click to pay the full amount or choose another amount to pay if they are paying in installments.
Once patients have paid, you’ll receive a notification about the payments and have the option to post them in the Ledger.
Watch this video to learn more about posting online payments in Dentrix.
Conclusion
You can address some of the challenges you’re facing when it comes to collections by adding QuickBill Email to your workflow. By collecting balances you would have written off, helping your team members spend less time creating statements and calling patients, and offering your patients a more convenient way to pay, you’ll help increase your collections and maintain a healthy cash flow in your practice.
Learn More
Watch the webinar recording titled, Increase Your Collections without Increasing Your Workload to
learn more about how to use QuickBill Email.
To learn how you can begin sending electronic statements to your patients, visit www.dentrix.com/electronicbilling.
Visit the QuickBill Email Quick Start page to watch videos and read tips about setting up and using QuickBill Email.
Read 5 Reasons You Should Be Sending Electronic Billing Statements for more ideas about ways to use QuickBill Email in your practice.
By Erin Brisk, Senior Editor
