How to Set Up and Use Statements Manager
- Dylan Nigh
The Statements Manager is a powerful tool for generating statements for all your accounts in your MacPractice database.
When first using Statements Manager, you will need to review the Setting Up Statements Manager section to configure everything to fit the needs of your office. The majority of this set up only applies for the first time you run Statements Manager. On subsequent visits, these options will have been set and unless there is a need to change them, you shouldn't need to re-configure these settings and you can go immediately to Printing A New Batch Of Statements.
For a comprehensive list of all options in Statements Manager, please refer to the Managers - Statements article.
Only a few of these options impact how your statements actually look. For a variety of options controlling the appearance and content of your statements, please refer to Preferences - Statements.
Setting Up Statements Manager
Setting Date Ranges for Generated Statements
First, you will want to make a decision on how much transaction history you want included on your generated statements. If you want to provide a complete history of all transactions for each statement, you can choose Print All Transactions. However, with a lengthy account history these statements could be many pages long.
If you want to contain printed transactions to a narrower date range, choose the "Print Transactions" option and set the desired Start date range.
Most offices choose an option between the last month and the last three months. For example, if your office wanted to include the last three months of transactions as of February 1st, 2017, you would choose a start date of 11/01/2016.
Use the End date range if you have a need to exclude transactions that occurred after a particular billing period you want to capture.
You will want to review this tab each time you run Statement Manager.
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Configuring Basic Filters
Next, you will need to configure how your basic filters are set. Please refer to the above posted screenshot.
With "Include Accounts with Patient and Insurance Portions" and "Include Accounts with Patient Portion Only" checked, the Statements Manager will primarily pull accounts that have a patient balance, but will also list accounts that have an insurance balance AND a patient balance.
This is the most standard arrangement, as this will print statements that have patient balances but will exclude accounts that only have an insurance balance.
If you want to print accounts that ONLY have a patient balance, uncheck "Include Accounts with Patient and Insurance Portions", but leave "Include Accounts with Patient Portion Only" checked.
You can also set minimum values that will exclude accounts that don't meet the set minimum balances.
Setting Provider/Office/Financial Status Filters
In the Provider Office tab, you can set filters for particular providers, offices (if you have an additional office license purchased) and Financial Statuses. Filtering by any of these options will exclude accounts that don't have the selected provider, office, or financial status set.
This is useful if you want to run all statements associated with a particular provider or office, or if you want to capture particular accounts set to a specific financial status.
There is also a checkbox present that will enable a fourth filter for attorneys.
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Configuring Finance Charges
In the Finance Charges tab, you can enable the assessment of finance charges on any overdue balances. You can set the monthly finance charge percentage in the Monthly Charges (%) field, which will autofill the Annual Charges (%) field and vice versa. You can also set a minimum and maximum cap as well.
If you choose NOT to assess Finance Charges, simply leave the "Finance Charges" checkbox unchecked and move on to the next section.
If you do choose to assess Finance Charges, we strongly recommend you set the Overdue field to 30 days or greater. We also recommend reviewing how the overdue base date is calculated.
By default, overdue dates are assessed by the Posted Service Date, but you can adjust this to assess by Procedure Date, or from the date of the last posted insurance payment.
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Adjusting Included Accounts in the Unapplied Tab
In the Unapplied tab, you can control what accounts are included based on what kind of balances they have on their account. You can also adjust the color that will display in the Statement Manager list for each of these items.
Include Accounts with Real Balances and no unapplied credits will make up the majority of your accounts. These are accounts that have a patient or insurance balance, but no unapplied amounts on the account. We strongly recommend you check this option. Accounts in this status are black by default.
Include Accounts with Credit Balance But No Account Balance, if checked, will include accounts that do not have a balance on their account, but have an unapplied payment on their account. The majority of offices leave this unchecked to avoid sending statements associated with these accounts, as the credit amount is usually intended to be applied to future charges. Accounts in this status are red by default.
Include Accounts with Balances and Unapplied Credits, if checked, includes accounts that have both an account balance and unapplied credits. We recommend checking this option, as these accounts are useful to include so you can visually see which accounts need to be reviewed, and which unapplied payments need to be applied. These accounts are blue by default.
Exclude Accounts Who have Received Statement in Last (__) days Who Have Had No Recent Activity is relatively self-explanatory. If checked, if an account has already received a statement within the set number of days, they will not be included. This is useful if you wish to avoid sending multiple statements to the same patients. We recommend you check this and set it for 30 days, or whatever your billing/statement period happens to be.
Print Open Charges Only can be useful but this option is only compatible with a Statement 4 Column form. This option will print only the charges that are open, as in haven't been paid. If using any other statement form, it is recommended to leave this unchecked.
Splitting Batches by Name Ranges
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If you have a particularly large database, it can take a long time to create statements for all of your accounts. If it takes a tremendous amount of time to generate statements, you may want to consider splitting your batches in half. The best way to achieve this is by using a name range filter.
Check the "Last Name in Range" box, and this will reveal the Starting Name and Ending Name fields. Enter letters from A to Z to contain what range that you want to run statements for.Â
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Setting Statement Messages
In the Statement Message tab, you can set a global statement message to be printed by checking the Print Global Statement Message box and filling out the text field.
You can also print Accounts Receivable messages if the account in question is overdue by checking the "Print A/R Message" and adjusting the text fields at the bottom of the window.
These options are designed for messages that you want to display most if not all of the time. For specific account messages, or one-time messages, refer to the Setting an Account or One-Time Message section.
Congratulations! You just set up Statements Manager! Now it's time to use it.
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Printing a New Batch of Statements Â
Confirm Date Ranges and Apply
Once you are certain that your statement manager settings are configured correctly for your office and you've confirmed the date range you would like to print in the Dates tab, you can click the Apply button to generate statements.
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Review Statement List
After clicking apply, the statement list will populate. This is your opportunity to review and mark which accounts you'd like to print statements for.
In the upper left of the statement list view, there is a "check all" checkbox that can be used to check every "print" box for every account listed. If an account is not checked after using this check all option, it may be that the Account may be set to not print a monthly statement in their Account tab in the Patient ability. Use the Go To Account to review the patient's account.
If Finance Charges are enabled, you can also use the right-most checkboxes to control which accounts are assessed finance charges.
You can double click any account in the Statement list to generate a preview statement to see how it would look before you print your statements.
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(Optional) Reconcile Any Account Issues
If you note any discrepancies, or there are unapplied amounts for accounts with a balance, you can go directly to their account by clicking the account in the list, and then clicking on the "Go To Account" button. This will take you to the Patient Ability with that account selected.
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(Optional) Set an Account or One-Time Message
There are several options available to print statement messages from Statements Manager. First, if an Account Message is already set on the account's Patient > Account > Account Message, it will pull automatically into the Account Message field in the lower right.
You can select a pre-set Statement Message by clicking the drop down "Set Statement Message" menu. To add Statement Messages, navigate to References > Statement Messages.
If you want to print a one-time message, check the "One Time Message" checkbox, and then type in the message below the checkbox.
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Set Statement Form
At the bottom of the Statement Manager window, there is a drop down menu to select the Statement Form. This list pulls from all the activated Statement forms in References > Forms. Select your desired form. Remember to double-click an account in the list to preview your chosen form.
For more information, refer to the References - Forms article.
Note: Remember to re-apply after changing the form selection.
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Print!
Once you've selected the accounts you wish to print statements for, you can click the Print button in the lower right corner of the Statement Manager screen. This will generate statements and assess finance charges for all selected statements. Be sure your printer has enough paper in it, and if you're using pre-printed statement forms, don't forget to load those in the printer!Â
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How to Delete an Erroneous Batch of Statements
If you ever need to delete a batch of statements that were just run, or you want to reverse all the finance charges associated with the last batch of statements you just ran, click the "View Batch Statements" button at the bottom-middle of the Statement Manager window.
To delete a batch, click the batch you wish to delete, and then click the "Delete Selected Batch" button. This will remove all the "Statement Sent" lines on the account ledgers, and it will also remove all assessed finance charges.