Practice Management Alert

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Methods to Post Interest Payments

Published on Fri Mar 01, 2002

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Question: How should we post interest paid by an insurance company? If we apply the interest to the patient's account, it generates a credit balance. Wouldn't it be better to apply the interest payment to a general interest account?

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Answer: You could establish a general interest account in your practice management computer system by creating a dummy patient and posting all the interest there. To do this, however, you will have to create a dummy charge to offset the interest payment, otherwise you will have a credit balance. This method of handling interest can help you keep track of how much total interest you're earning, but it may not allow you to keep track of which patient account was originally involved in the payment on which the interest was paid. Another way to handle interest paid is by creating a dummy charge for interest within a patient account. That way, the interest paid offsets the charge, and it can be tracked by the patient account from which it originated.