One of the challenges practices face with collecting balances is that you’ll often write off small patient balances because it’s not worth the time or expense to collect them.

At times your patients may end up with a balance of under $10 after insurance has paid on their claim. Even if patients make a partial payment at the time of service, they may still end up with a small balance after insurance has finally paid their portion.

It may not be worth the time and expense of printing and mailing a billing statement to collect on small amounts, so you may just end up writing it off. But several small amounts add up, and you could be writing off hundreds of dollars. But writing off those small amounts doesn’t have to be the self-sacrificing remedy any more!

Using QuickBill Email (available as an add-on to Dentrix G7.4 and higher), you can increase your collections and be able to collect those small patient balances through emailed statements.

In this modern age, patients expect to receive an electronic bill and to be able to pay it online. That’s the way they expect to receive their dental bills as well. The easier it is for patients to pay, the better the chance they will pay.

When patients receive a billing statement through QuickBill Email, they can easily see the amount due. From this emailed statement, they can click View E-Statement to see their full billing statement with all of the details, as well as click a link to pay the due amount.

The good news is that when you send patients a statement using QuickBill Email, you don’t have the overhead costs of printing and mailing, which means you can bill for the small amounts you normally would have written off, and those small amounts will add up in your favor.

To send billing statement emails for small amounts, you should set up a couple of specific options when you generate your billing statements.

• Move the Balance Forward Date back a few months so that patients can see a history of their treatment, any payments they made, and insurance payments. The more information they have the better they will understand where their balance is coming from.
• Make sure the Minimum Balance to Bill is set to the lowest amount you want to collect. That may have been set at $10 or $20 in the past, but you can set it to $.01 to bill for any amount patients owe you.

By collecting balances you would have previously written off, you’ll help increase your collections and maintain a healthy cash flow in your practice.

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