Normally every patient who receives payment from a single carrier-payer will have Insurance Plans and Policies that are linked to that single insurance carrier in SOS. See the article Understanding Insurance Carriers, Plans, and Policies. When that is true, making bulk payments is pretty painless. You enter the check, or EFT voucher, with its full amount for the first payment. When you complete the first patient’s payment, you select another patient related to the carrier, apply more of the same check or EFT voucher, and so on until the entire payment has been applied.
Manually splitting a single check across more than one SOS carrier
Nevertheless, mistakes in configuration can result in more than one of your SOS carriers in your list conveying payments in a single check or EFT. In that event, posting a payment will be a more tedious process of breaking up an EOB or EFT report into two or more groups to match the carriers used in your SOS data, entering a separate check voucher for each group, selecting the appropriate check voucher for each patient’s payments, and finally adjusting the voucher amounts to match the payments for all related payments.
There are several variations you can use to manually enter these cross-carrier payments accurately, but here is one procedure recommended by the SOS Support Team:
- Starting with the first patient on the EOB or EFT report, Open a new credit entry in the current daysheet.
- Select the Patient and the Payer, then select Check or EFT as the Credit Type.
- The next step, as usual, is to select an existing check or EFT voucher or to create a new voucher. As we are still working on the first patient, there will be no relevant voucher available, so create a new one by clicking the New button in the lower right corner of the voucher list.
In the Amount field of the voucher, enter the full amount of the check or EFT. - Upon saving the voucher, you will find yourself back on the Credit entry screen, and the full amount of the voucher will appear in the Credit Amount field. Jot down the name of the payer for which you entered the voucher.
- Confirm that the selection for the If Any Unappled Amount field is set to “Keep the unapplied amount on this Check/Voucher” as shown here:
- Highlight a charge in the lower area of the Credit screen and click the Apply Credit button.
- The Credit Split window will pop up, with the appropriate information for the charge you had highlighted when you clicked the Apply Credit button. SOS will assume that you are paying the outstanding balance for the charge, but if the payment is a lesser amount, change the value in the Amount To Apply field. If you are paying less than the full balance and would like to adjust or transfer a portion of the balance, you can also do that here. When done, click the Save and Close button to return to the Credit entry.
- If the EOB or EFT is paying any other charges for this patient, just repeat Steps 5 through 7 until you are ready to go on to the next patient. If there are no more charges for this patient, click Save and Close in the top toolbar to return to the Daysheet list.
- Now we are ready to enter a payment from the same EOB or EFT for the next patient, so create a new Credit, select the next patient and select the appropriate payer. If this new patient’s list of payers includes the same one used previously, the voucher you entered before will be available to select. Do so and loop through Steps 5 through 7 until finished with payments for this patient. If this new patient has a related, but different payer, proceed to the next step. Otherwise skip to Step 11.
- If there is no relevant voucher present to select, then you will have to enter a new voucher as in Step 3 above. As before, you will enter the full amount of the check or EFT for the voucher amount. Confirm the unapplied option with Step 5, jot down the name of the payer, then loop through Steps 6 and 7 until finished with payments for this patient.
- If there are no more patients left on the EOB or EFT, all that is left is to adjust the amount on each of the vouchers you created. Find that paper on which you jotted down the names of the insurance payers for which you created the vouchers for the EOB or EFT. (Tip: If you can’t find it, you can go to the Daysheet and recreate the list by looking in the Description column of each of the Credits you just entered.)
- In the main program navigation bar (usually on the left side of the screen, click Billing Lookups, then Insurance Carriers. Double-click the first payer on your list, the select either the Check Vouchers or EFT Vouchers tab, depending on whether you were paying from a check or from an EFT.
- Double-click the voucher that you created in the steps above. Now change the value in the Amount field to the actual amount you distributed while applying payments from this voucher. That corrected amount can be calculated two ways:
- Continue down your list of payers until you have adjusted the amount for every voucher you created during this procedure.
