Adjust Contract Fees & Schedules

Use the Fees tab of the Contract Structure editor to work with the initial fees, periodic fees, and retention fees for each responsible party, and to apply treatment fee adjustments such as family discounts.

How to Get Here

• Open patient finance page - Open patient > Finance page.

   

  

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• Choose contract - Select a contract from the list at the left of the window. If the contract group you want is collapsed, click the [+] button to expand it so you can see all the billing names. (See "View Patient Finances" for details.)

   

  

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• Launch Contract Structure editor - Choose Contract Structure from the Patient ribbon bar.

   

  

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  (This option is not available when you have selected to work with a partial contract, that is, a treatment phase that has charge and/or payment transactions but no formal contract created.)

• Open Fees tab - Click the Fees tab at the top of the Contract Structure editor window.

   

  

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• Choose contract member - Use the billing grid at the top of the window to select the responsible party or insurance detail that you want to work with.

   

  

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Use This Feature

• Add initial, retention or period fees - Click add beside the type of fee you want to create. (If the contract already has payments for that type of fee, click an existing payment instead.) The fields at the lower left of the window default to creating a single transaction for the remaining unallocated amount for this billing party.

   

  • Add initial fees - Enter the date the fee will be due, and either the dollar amount or the percent of the Contract Portion to charge. Then click add.

    

  • Add retention fees - Enter the date the fee will be due, and either the dollar amount or the percent of the Contract Portion to charge. Then click add.

    

  • Add period fees - Enter the date the first fee in this series should be due, and the payment interval. You can then enter two of the three payment details: The dollar amount, number of payments or total amount for this payment series. The remaining field is calculated automatically, showing you a summary of the transactions that will be created when you click add.

    If the calculations do not work out evenly, you can either enable the apply remainder to final payment option, or disable the option to add one more payment to the end of the period fee schedule.

    In our example, we add period fees to a contract with an existing payment plan.

    

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• Apply adjustments - Adjustments to a contract decrease the amount the billing party is obligated to pay, but do not affect your production total. You might use a fee adjustment to apply a family discount, electronic payment policy discount, or to write off the balance of a transferred or abandoned account. (Also see "delete future payments", below.)

  To create an adjustment transaction, click add in the adjustments section of the window (or click an existing adjustment, if there is one). Select the adjustment type and specify the dollar amount or percentage of the fee to apply. Then click add. Although you enter a positive amount, the fee schedule is reduced by the adjustment amount. The date of the adjustment is automatically set to today.

  • Do not apply a fee adjustment here to reduce the total contract fee. If you want to change the total contract fee (and affect your total production), use the Treatment Fee tab instead. See "Adjust Total Contract Fee" for details.

  • These transactions appear in the Treatment Fee Adjustments section of your Transaction report.

   

  

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• Edit the payment plan - Use the actions section of the window to make changes to the payment plan.

  • Delete an individual payment - Click a payment, then click the delete transaction action. You might delete a transaction if, for example, you applied an adjustment and need to reduce the number of period fees to charge. Or, you might delete a transaction that was entered in error so that you can add the appropriate fee to the schedule.

     

    

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  • Delete future payments / write off account - Click the delete future payments action to erase all transactions that are scheduled to be charged out in the future. You can then reallocate the fee with a new payment schedule, or apply an adjustment for the unallocated amount to write off the fee.

     

    

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  • Move all future fee dates forward / Place contract on "hold" - Click the first transaction to work with, then click the move all future fee dates forward action and enter the number of months to increase each subsequent fee date, regardless of the fee type. In other words, if you choose to move and initial fee transaction forward, all retention fees and period fees that fall after the date of that initial fee will also be moved forward. This feature is especially useful for placing contracts on "hold" for a certain period of time.

     

    

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  • Increase / decrease individual fee by under/over allocated amount - When the payment schedule is out of balance (often due to removing or adding too many fees or reallocating the contract), you can easily increase or decrease an individual transaction to absorb the difference by selecting the transaction to change and clicking this action.

     

    

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  • Increase / decrease future period fees - When the payment schedule is out of balance (often due to removing or adding too many fees or reallocating the contract), you can click this action to spread out the difference among all remaining scheduled period fees. Of course, if there are no future period fees, this option is not available.

     

    

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• Review & save - Go to the summary tab to compare the details of the original payment schedule with your proposed changes. Once you click Save at the bottom of the Contract Structure editor, your changes become permanent and the summary is reset so that your new payment schedule is considered the "original". See "Review & Save Contract Structure" for details.

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