Using Payment Vouchers

Posted on | by sos documentation

Every payment, whether cash, check, credit card, electronic funds transfer (EFT), or “Other”, must be associated with a Voucher. The Voucher includes:

  • The date of the payment.
  • The amount of the payment.
  • The identity of the payer, be it an insurance company, the patient herself, or some other non-insurance payer.
  • A description of the payment.
  • A list of specific patient credits made from the payment. (A voucher could be for a large payment that you then split among any number of patient accounts.)
  • A list of any portions of the payment that were refunded to the payer.
  • [Checks only] Check number.
  • [EFT only] EFT Number.

For your convenience, when you enter a new Credit to the Daysheet, you can add a new Voucher on the fly, or you can apply an amount from a previously entered Voucher. If there are existing Vouchers that have not been fully distributed, you will see a reminder on the Credit screen as soon as you select the Payer. Just select the desired Credit Type to view and select an undistributed Voucher to apply. You can, of course, apply any amount up to the entire undistributed amount shown on the Voucher.

This notification was displayed as soon as the payer was selected. In this (unlikely) example, there are Vouchers with undistributed amounts among the payer’s checks, cash payments, credit card payments, and EFT’s and even Other Vouchers. (You would have to click in the notification field and scroll right to see them all.)
In this example, we have selected Credit Card as the Credit Type, then we clicked in the Credit Card Voucher field to show available Vouchers. We can now select an existing Voucher, or click the New button in the lower right to create a new Credit Card Voucher.

Viewing Existing Vouchers

If you should want to review existing Vouchers, remember that Vouchers belong to Payers, not Patients. The most direct way to access them is to start from the Payer that owns them. From the main navigation panel, open Billing Lookups, then the appropriate Payer List: Insurance Carriers, Patient (Self) Payers, or Private Payers (that is, Payers that are neither Insurance Carriers nor Patient Payers.

Select the desired Payer from the list. At the top of the Payer detail screen, you will see tabs that include the various types of Vouchers:

Just click the type in which you are interested to see a list of specific Vouchers. Below is shown a list of existing Check Vouchers for Patient Payer Donna Bailey. Double-click one to view or edit :

Note that you cannot change the amount of a voucher to less than the amount that has already been applied. For example, if you have a voucher of amount $100, and you have already applied $75, you cannot change the amount of the voucher to less than $75.