Case study #5: Should you handle payment plans in-house?
Offering payment plans to your clients has a very positive impact on your practice. However, you should not be mailing invoices to accomplish this task. Your accounts receivable (A/R) system should be implementing automatic debiting of credit cards or checking accounts. With today’s technology automatic, recurring debiting is easy. Where the problems arise is when an automatic debit returns for any number of reasons.
What is your policy on handling returns? What are your procedures when you receive a return from your bank? Do you have the manpower to handle the returns and make the follow-up calls, send letters or emails? Is all the sensitive data, credit card numbers, bank account information, personal information on your clients secure. What is your procedure if your client changes or gets new bank information? Do you have dedicated staff that only handles your A/R management?
If you do not have the answers or procedures in place for all these questions you should be outsourcing your A/R to a professional billing and customer support company. Do not just use a billing company, that is the easy part of A/R management. You need to select a company that handles the billing as well as all the customer support that is needed to maintain a high payment compliance. A company that acts as an extension of your own practice.
As our case study #5 shows, by outsourcing your accounts receivable to a professional A/R company you can see an enormous increase in monthly revenue. Furthermore, if you do not have a dedicated staff for A/R management, you will increase profitability by having your staff concentrate on what they do best, vet med, not billing..