Best Practice Guidelines: Medical | Dental | Allieds

There are some steps to be taken weekly to ensure financial, stock and data accuracy and to do credit control.

The following tasks and reports will be discussed pertaining to daily controls:

Income & Expenditure

Income and Expenditure controls must be done on a weekly basis to ensure sound cash flow and unexpected expenses to be managed. 

The following checks are to be done weekly on debtor accounts:

• Invoices outstanding
• Payment plan follow up (If the practice is using this function)
• EDI Responses
• Unlinked Receipts
• Refunds
• Electronic Remittance Advice received and posted

Weekly creditors and stock checks to be done:

• Invoices outstanding
• Credit Notes/Debit Notes
• Stock Control

Weekly Accounting checks to be done:

• Bank Statement imports
• Allocations to ledger accounts and Auxiliary cashbooks

Medical Aids & Stock updates

As the medical industry changes with regards to medical aids, medical aid administrators, stock items and prices, it is important to keep the software data up to date mainly for billing and switching purposes. Updates are done by running new files from either Medprax or IQest (depending on whom the practice is contracted with to receive its updated industry information) or to do manual updates in the software.

Medical aid updates will include information on the medical aid schemes and administrators and routing codes used for switching purposes.

Stock updates will include important information on medicine and materials, discontinued items, prices and Nappi codes.

With cycle counts, the stock is kept up to date and any mistakes or process faults will be investigated and processes can be put in place to prevent further stock losses.

Item Management

Item Management is an ongoing process. Most of the daily controls of item management will be done on a daily or weekly basis depending on the size of the practice. The best practice will always be to complete the work on a daily basis and the controls on a weekly basis. Please refer back to the daily controls. 

• Update Medprax excluded items:
• Prices
• Nappi Codes
• Update Markups

Credit Control

Credit control is the process by which the practice follows up on overdue debtor accounts. The credit control process is divided into cycles so that different actions are taken during the different phases of the process, e.g.:

1. after 30 days, the debtor will be contacted via SMS/Email/telephone call;
2. after 60 days the debtor will receive a final letter of demand;
3. after 90 days the debtor will be handed over for legal debt collection.

The credit control process will be different for Medical Aid outstanding accounts and Private Patient outstanding accounts. If medical aids do not pay outstanding accounts and the switch response does not indicate a decline of payment, the practice will follow up with the medical aid why payment has not been processed. Once the medical aid responds with a decline of payment, the outstanding account will be moved to indicate that the invoice is due by the patient and the debtor will be contacted for payment. 

The following functions and reports can be used for credit control purposes:

• Age Analysis Report
• Communication (SMS, Emails, Telephone calls)
• Notebook
• The Credit Control Assistant

The Credit Control Assistant is a function in GoodX that automatically guides the credit controller through the credit control cycles. The credit-control cycles can be customised to meet the practice's requirements.

Credit control is important to ensure that outstanding accounts do not turn into bad debts to be written off.

Weekly Backup 

• Confirm backups are being made and copied to external sources that are kept off-site.
• Please read the GoodX Learning Centre (IT & Technical > Data Management) for a proper understanding of the best practice backup regime.
• GoodX Web App and Cloud clients' backups are completed and safely stored by GoodX to alleviate the burden of keeping up-to-date backups by the practice.