When was the last time you took a close look at your practice’s billing processes and results?
Given the current inflationary environment, where everything from food to gas costs more, you may want to take a close look at your billing practices to help maintain and protect cash flow.
Effective billing practices are essential to capturing all possible revenue and maintaining or boosting your bottom line. Services rendered may not be correctly billed due to oversight, the lack of standardized processes, or insufficient training, and the costs of these mistakes can add up over time.
To address this, it’s a good idea to regularly speak with your staff about the importance of accurate billing and the negative financial implications of missed charges. Use this as an opportunity to foster teamwork and commitment to achieve a common goal: 100% accuracy in billing.
Consider making this responsibility part of job descriptions and performance reviews. Linking pay and performance for billing accuracy reinforces its importance and can motivate greater attention to detail.
Also, inexpensive rewards – like a pizza party at the end of a month with no billing omissions or a gift card to the person with the best track record for accurate billing – can go a long way to engage your team in upholding best-in-class practices.
As people get caught up in the flurry of daily office activities, shortcuts or slight adjustments to protocols may emerge and, over time, become routine. Keep your billing protocols intact with periodic training where procedures and protocols are reviewed and goals for billing accuracy are reinforced. To keep it interesting, consider conducting a “mock appointment” to refresh your team’s knowledge and understanding of expectations.
Regular audits of billing records can help identify billing errors, omissions, or oversights. This can range from simply auditing a few bills each week to hiring an outside firm to evaluate billing performance and opportunities. Watching key financial indices – like revenue-to-expense ratios or gross margin – can help identify red flags signaling potential billing issues.
Finally, with the constant evolution of technology, staying in the know about billing systems and capabilities can help you identify additional opportunities to automate and reduce the likelihood of missed fees.
If you simply can’t see adding these responsibilities to your already overflowing to-do list, give RBT CPAs a call. Whether you want to outsource bookkeeping and accounting, audit your practice or books, or rent a CFO part-time, we would appreciate having the opportunity to show you how we can be Remarkably Better Together.
RBT CPAs has been providing accounting, audit, advisory, and tax services to businesses in the Hudson Valley and beyond for over 55 years. We are proud to say 100% of our work is prepared in America. Our company does not offshore work, so you always know who is handling your confidential financial data.