Post and Manage Payments from a Collection Agency

As the name suggests, a collection agency is responsible for collecting a patient's outstanding payments. Follow this guide to learn how to post and manage payments from a collection agency for patients within CareStack.

Take a look at this tutorial for a brief walkthrough.

Let's get started.

• Navigate to the System Menu > select Collection Payments.

• Click Add New Payment on the upper right or in the middle of the screen.

• Select the Collection Agency.
• Fill out the necessary Payment Details.
• Click Add Receipt.

Note: The Payment Amount will be the amount sent to your office from the collection agency, NOT the total paid to the collection agency.

• A toast notification will appear on the top right as 'Transaction Completed Successfully.'

• The newly added Payment Receipt will appear at the top of the list on the left-hand side.
• Click to select the newly added Receipt.

• Select the Patient to whom the payment needs to be applied.

Note: If the patient does not appear in this list, it means they either Do Not have a balance on their account or they do not have the system patient flag "Sent to Collections" added.

• Enter the Total Paid to the collection agency and the amount Paid to Practice.

Note

• You can only post the values equal to the patient amount. You cannot post a higher amount, as the function to preserve any unapplied credits here is not currently available.
• Ensure that the entered values are correct. For example, the Paid to Practice cannot be higher than the Total Paid. If the calculation validation does not match, you will get an error banner stating the exact issue.

• The system utilizes the entered global values for Total Paid and Paid to Practice to split and auto-populate the individual values including the commission for all treatment codes.
• Click Apply Payments.

Note: If the patient paid the agency $100 and $70 was forwarded to the practice, then $30 is automatically calculated as the agency's Collection Commission. These figures are provided by the collection agency on their remittance/invoice sent with the payment.

• Users can override line-level values if they feel more or all of the commissions should be allocated to a specific provider.

Note: When the line level values are overridden, the auto calculation function of the collection payments will stop.

• If the patient still has a balance in collections, DO NOT confirm to remove the label Sent to Collections, so you can apply future payments to this patient from the collection agency.
• In a similar scenario, click No to proceed.

• You will see a toast notification on the top right as 'Payment Successfully added.'

• Since you will be working on a bulk collection payment with several patients on it, ensure to continue this workflow until all patients for a collection payment are accounted for.
• You will see the Total Credits to work with and the remaining Unapplied Credits on the top.

• To view previously applied payments on a collection payment, click on Applied Payments.
• Here you can view the patients who had payments allocated to them.

• A quick shortcut to the Patient Snapshot can be accessed under the Apply to Patients tab.
• Click on Patient Snapshot and select the respective tabs to view the Patient's Insurance, Account specifics, or any Medical Alerts.
• Use the Quick Links to navigate to Patient Overview, Ledger, Treatment, Chart, etc.

Use this guide for a quick understanding of the process to post and manage payments from a collection agency.