Do you have a solid approach to reconciling your EMR and your accounting software?

If you don’t, the good news is that you’re not alone.

When our team checks in with different practices, we notice that many of their EMRs don’t match their Quickbooks — and they don’t have solid protocols for rectifying that.

The bad news? Without the checks and balances of reconciliation, it’s too easy to miss (or not collect) payment.

For instance, if you don’t make sure what the billing team posted in your EMR is also in your accounting software, you may not have actually received the money. On the other side, you may have received a payment that doesn’t get put into the EMR which means that the claim still shows outstanding even once paid. In this case the patient may owe a deductible that you aren’t collecting. Plus, your team could be spending time on a task that was already completed.

Your EMR and accounting software won’t always match perfectly because the dates payments are received versus posted to your account may be different. But it’s critical to a thriving practice that you only record claim payments that you actually receive.

Too often we see that payments are posted into the EMR that weren’t ever received or payments are received that never make it into the EMR.

One area where we’ve noticed this issue is especially concerning is with the growing prevalence of Virtual Credit Card payments that payers send. Some of these payments arrive via fax and aren’t treated as actual deposits. They can end up in billing and get recorded without being processed. Depending on the volume of such payments you receive each month, you could be missing out on significant revenue.

We recommend two steps for reconciling your bank account and your EMR.

1) Only post payments that appear in your bank account.

Talk to your billing team to make sure they only post payments that actually appear in your bank account. One way to achieve this is by granting them read-only access to your account and instructing them to record only the payments they can verify.

This approach has an added benefit of prompting the billing team to investigate payments received without accompanying paperwork by checking payer sites.

2) Review payment reports regularly.

On a regular basis (e.g., bi-weekly or monthly), generate a report of all payments and compare them in both the EMR and your accounting software.

You might be tempted to only try one of these, but we recommend implementing both and assigning them to different parties. For instance, option 1 can be handled by your billing team or billing service, while option 2 can be executed by the office manager.

Establish clear policies and then communicate clearly to your team. The goal is that no payments slip through the cracks.

If this is a problem area for your team, consider making it a measurable goal. And if you discover any discrepancies using these methods, let us know. We love to celebrate your success.