It’s important for any business that takes payments from clients to run regular reports to make sure that the cash and electronic payments taken match with what’s recorded in your practice management software.
If your payment systems aren’t integrated with your software this can be a time-consuming process. Staff will need to manually reconcile cash and electronic payments with what your software shows. And, if there was a mistake during the day it can be even more time-consuming to identify which payment was at fault.
Integrated payment processing solutions, however, go above the ‘norm’ of reporting to make end-of-day reconciliation a lot simpler and quicker.
Improve and simplify your end-of-day balancing
One of the ways they do this is by catching mistakes, and sometimes even fixing them, as they happen. This means you or your team may not have to resolve any issues at the end of a long day before heading home.
When your payment solution is integrated with your practice software, there’s also less manual data entry required when taking payments. So, it’s less likely that clients will be charged incorrectly – making this one less error that may need resolving at the end of the day. Integrated payment processing systems also minimize the opportunity for mistakes and missed payments to happen in the first place.
Minimize missed payments and mistakes
One way missed payments can easily occur is if a client’s card is declined, or if there was a problem while processing the transaction. When a system isn’t integrated it’s easy to miss these errors and mark the invoice as paid, only to realize at the end of the day that the payment didn’t go through after all.
With non-integrated payment systems, this means manually going through each transaction to match the payment to the invoice amount to find out where the payment was missed.
With an integrated system, however, a declined payment or processing error is automatically picked up and shown as an ‘unprocessed transaction’. Often, this happens while the client is still in your clinic, so payment can be attempted again right then and there.
However, if this error isn’t picked up until the end of the day, the unprocessed payment will immediately notify you when you run your end-of-day reporting. It can then be quickly associated with the patient record, making it much easier to follow up on.
Automate client payments
Integrated payment processing systems also make it easier to take and reconcile regular payments from your clients. This is a great feature if you run wellness plans, or have other payment plans in place for your clients.
An integrated payment processing system will automatically attribute the payment from a client to the correct patient record and keep your financial records up to date. Again, any missed or declined payments are easily identified in reporting, allowing you to get in touch with the client to address any issues.