Behind the scenes, all of your transactions are recorded using standard double-entry journal entries. Although regular SOS users never need to think about the technical bookkeeping associated with their charges, credits, transfers, and splits, financial professionals may want to inspect the details from time to time. For example, there might be some question about changes in a patient or payer account that comes up in the context of an annual audit, or someone might want to know why a total on a report changed from one date to another. Such questions often can be answered by looking at the plain English change logs associated with transactions in question, but in some cases bookkeeping specifics, that is, debits and credits, are needed.
To inspect the bookkeeping journal entries associated with any Charge (including transfers of responsibility) or Credit, just open the appropriate entry in the Patient Ledger list and click the Accounting Entries tab.
On the Accounting Entries tab, you will find the double entry bookkeeping entries made over time that are associated with the current Charge or Credit. Here we have the existing Accounting Entries for the open charge entry. The lower line is the original entry. The upper one is the bookkeeping to document a subsequent transfer of responsibility from one payer to another:
Double-clicking the transfer, we can see the specifics. You can see that the system recorded the transfer as a credit of $10 to Medicare, and a debit of $10 to the patient. In plain English all that means is that we moved $10 of responsibility from the patient’s Medicare payer to the patient himself.
The same transfer is also documented in the Change Log for each payer’s charge split. To see that, you go back to the main Charge screen for the transaction, then double-click the splits in which you are interested. With a split open on the screen, you click the Change Log tab. Here is the Change Log entry for the patient’s personal charge split. It shows that the split amount was changed from $20 to $30…
… and here is the corresponding Change Log entry for the Medicare payer’s charge split, which shows that Medicare’s responsibility was reduced from $100 to $90:
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