Collections -- Ensuring Your Numbers Are Accurate

Properly recording payments in the collections process at a dental office can be complicated, especially if the dental office participates in one or more dental insurance networks.  And the more complicated, the more room for human error.  One simple way to reduce errors is to verify the deposit slip that accompanies the checks that go to the bank matches the record of payments for the day in the dental practice management software.  If the two do not match exactly, an error has been made somewhere along the way and the person responsible for the deposit should find and correct the error.

Here are a few tips and comments about this system:

• Deposits should be grouped by full calendar day. For example, checks and cash that are recorded on Monday should be deposited separately from checks that are recorded any other day.  This allows for a clean and consistent convention for grouping payments on deposit slips.  Further, most dental practice management software can only generate payment reports for full calendar days.  You cannot typically get a report of checks that were received from Monday afternoon to Tuesday morning.
• Keep copies of the deposit slips that go to the bank AND the payment reports from the practice management software.  You can scan these documents if you are a paperless office.  The historical records can be valuable if patient account entries are lost or altered in the future.
• If there is any chance at all of embezzlement, dishonesty, cheating, theft, whatever you want to call it, consider reconciling the payment records from the practice management software with deposits in the bank on a monthly basis.  This reconciliation should include credit card payments, care credit payments, electronic deposits, and patient refunds in addition to cash and check deposits.  The person performing the reconciliation should NOT be the person responsible for handling the money stuff on a day to day basis.  Even if everyone is honest, this monthly reconciliation can catch a few innocent but costly errors on a monthly basis.
• Be aware that while this system improves accuracy in the records of money received by the office, it does not address errors or dishonesty with regard to writeoffs.  If the person processing payments is entering artificially high writeoffs, this system will not detect the errors.