Accounts Receivable
While managing your medical practice, you must have run into the challenge of unpaid invoices by your patients. These unfulfilled bills not only affect your revenue but also hinder your operations. When the respective patients do not effectively settle them, the losses that they incur can easily run your operations into the ground in St. Louis, MO.
That is why your practice must look into effective methods to address this challenge. By establishing proper measures, you can get your accounts receivable (AR) to settle within a timely manner. Bring your Accounts Receivable and Collections all under one roof with HMS Collections. Make it one seamless operation with our team of professionals. Get the job done quickly and efficiently, discuss what options best fit your company's needs in St. Louis, MO.
What Is an Account Receivable?
An account receivable refers to a certain sum of funds owed to a business against services rendered. These funds are to be paid by the respective client who benefited from the business' solutions.
For medical practices, accounts receivable refer to unpaid medical bills due to be settled by the respective patients. If these bills are not paid, the AR remains in limbo and gets treated as pending revenue. To fulfill an AR, you need to get it paid by the respective client. This resolves the pending revenue problem and lets you record the AR as a proper inward transaction in St. Louis, MO.
How Does One Become an Effective Accounts Receivable Manager
An accounts receivable manager is responsible for handling credit, recovering AR, and settling payments against unfulfilled invoices. They achieve this feat by assessing potential clients, contacting existing customers, resolving ongoing conflicts, and ensuring that payments are made on time in St. Louis, MO.
Ensure Timely Payments
To be an effective accounts receivable manager, a professional has to possess a few choice skills. This is especially true for AR management of medical practices, which have an intricate background involving several industry complexities.
Keeping this in mind, an effective AR manager has to be an expert in the following aspects.
- Critical thinking.
- Enhanced research.
- Financial assessment.
- Grasp on federal and state laws.
- Knowledge of legal processes.
- Proactive communication.
- Extensive recovery experience.
- Assertive argument skills.
- Pursuant yet respectful attitude.
- Understanding of medical industry jargon.
- Information regarding specific medical procedures.
- Compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FRCA).
- Accounts Payable and Customer Account Awareness in St Louis MO
In addition to these soft and hard skills, accounts receivable managers also need access to collections and recovery software. This streamlines their work and ensures that they can provide a high success rate for turning receivable to cash.
From daily cash receipts to cash posting data, accounts payable, and the ability to process payments in a streamlined manner combined with collecting service delivery, the right services can improve your overall operation.
The Importance of Communication With Customers and Vendors
Accounts Receivable management services are offered by established firms that can hold their own in the face of unique challenges. Out of these businesses, some of the most successful ventures specialize in a particular niche. For instance, those accounts receivable management services that focus on medical practices may have a higher success rate at resolving medical AR than those that only offer general recovery services.
It is because accounts receivable recovery is highly dependent on communication. If your patients or customers are not feeling satisfied or pursued by the calls, emails, or texts they have received, they wouldn't feel the need to settle their payment. In many cases, this delay only lasts for a few days. In other situations, it keeps prolonging to the point where it hurts your operations quite significantly.
Communication with customers and vendors is also necessary because it helps the accounts receivable manager dig into the actual reason for non-payment. For example, if a customer is not settling their payment due to running out of funds, you may not understand the reason until they inform you about it by themselves. In some scenarios, patients might be holding a negative experience with your practice as the reason to hold back their current payment. Once again, you may remain unaware until they provide you with direct feedback.
By reaching out to such customers, your accounts receivable manager can get to the root cause of non-payment and work to resolve it through their skills. This makes sure that you don't have to bid farewell to your revenue. Instead, you can recover it as much and as soon as possible with smooth and efficient billing in St. Louis, MO.
Setting up a System That Will Work for You
Medical accounts receivables have various intricacies attached to them. For some medical facilities, their bills become due after 30 days of issuance. But even in those cases, invoices are only sent to collections after 90 days have passed. Some practices wait even longer and turn bills over to collections after waiting for 180 days.
Some practices find it easier to settle their claims through insurance, while others don't have much luck. In addition to the type of medical practice, insurance settlement also depends on the treatment or procedure that the patient has received. This lands you into various pending payments that include but are not limited to direct payments, copays, deductibles, and coinsurance. That is where it gets even more important to settle accounts receivable directly through patients on time.
It is also important to remember that some customers may ignore reminder calls altogether, while others may not respond to reminder letters. Therefore, it is important to determine the most responsive methods for each customer to get maximum results out of your communication. By setting up a system with all of these factors in mind, you can ensure that your medical practice manages its accounts receivable with the utmost efficiency.
From resolving patients' doubts about not receiving insurance support to pressing upon the crucial nature of timely payments, a reliable accounts receivable management company can help you address all necessary pressure points through a personalized recovery strategy in St. Louis, MO.
How To Avoid Getting Overwhelmed by Your Accounts Receivable Responsibilities
If you are playing the dual roles of a medical professional and an accounts receivable recovery executive, you cannot give your best to either of these positions regarding customer accounts. In addition to harming your chances for effective recovery of your funds, you can also run the risk of diminishing the quality of care received by your patients.
Fortunately, hiring an Accounts Receivable management company to take care of your unpaid invoices effectively resolves this problem. By delegating the task to specialized professionals, you can steer clear of stretching yourself thin. When you have an active and dedicated Accounts Receivable manager working for you, you can easily focus on your work and manage your operations. This saves you and your staff from playing the roles of recovery agents. Instead, you can stay committed to your practice and help your patients in an ideal manner.
To ensure that you do not get overwhelmed by your account receivable responsibilities, you can follow these tips in St. Louis, MO.
- Maintain clear financial records.
- Keep your data in digital format.
- Consult with a reliable AR management solution.
- Find out personalized recovery approaches that address your needs.
- Hire the right AR management service and delegate your responsibilities.
- Make regular checks to be on top of the progress being made for recovery.
By keeping these tips in mind, you can make sure not to let them pile up and burden your practice. Instead, your accounts receivable management firm takes care of all the important factors and delivers effective results to you. This provides you with more time with your core practice and allows you to scale your business consistently.
At HMS Collections, we specialize in offering effective, efficient, and result-oriented account receivable management solutions to all types of practices. Whether you run your private practice or work as a part of a physician group, our services can help you streamline your finances in an ideal manner.
To see how our solutions can help in St. Louis, MO, don't hesitate to contact us today at (636) 538-5119. We will be glad to hold a detailed consultation and deploy recovery solutions that work for your AR management needs.