Aging of Accounts

This is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

Now, this tip is more appropriate for those people who take insurance than those people who have a cash practice but it's important for both of you, and that is every month you should be running an aging of accounts. Now what is an aging of accounts? An aging of accounts is a report that tells you what patients owe you money and how much they owe you and when they owed you for how long they've owed you. It'll have the patient's name- the report will have the patient's name. It'll say they owe you so much money, 0 to 30 days, 30 to 60 days, 60 to 90 days, 90 to 120, and over 120.

Now, if you're an insurance practice and somebody owes you money from 0 to 30 days, I wouldn't get too excited about it yet because probably insurance just hasn't paid yet. When it gets over 30 days, you have to look at each account that's over 30 days and say, "Why has this bill not been paid?" Then you have some choices, you're either going to have to re-bill the insurance company or you're going to have to see if they paid you and you forgot to write it off and then write it off or you have to see if the patient owes that balance and then you have to bill the patient. Every month you should run an aging of accounts because that way your accounts receivable don't get out of control and you'll collect the money that you deserve from doing the work that you've done.

If you're a cash practitioner, you probably don't have to run it as often. It's important that you run it every once in a while to make sure that nobody's falling through the cracks and that they've owe you money that they have not paid you yet.

That's our tip for today. I hope that you enjoy it and I hope that it helps build your practice as a result of it.