Billing 

In the Manage module, click the Billing button.

The filter section on the left half of the window controls which patients get included in the billing list. After you change the settings, you can click the Save As Default button to save them for the next time you run the billing. The date at the upper left will show one month ago.  This causes everyone who has not been billed in the last month to be included. It's a good idea to put at least $1 in the exclude box. It's a waste of money to send a bill to someone who owes less than $1.

The date range area towards the lower right lets you set the date range that will show on each bill.  Click the default button.

This sets the defaults for the date range, intermingle option, and general message.

Appointment reminders will always show on all bills.

Daily vs Monthly Billing
Rather than billing once a month, consider printing a few bills every day. The patients don't get billed more often than once a month, but it still helps get the bills out in a more timely manner and improve cash flow. Check the box at the top to include accounts with changes since their last bill. This causes a bill to get sent for anyone who has had an insurance payment come in or work performed, but did not yet get a new bill showing the change.

If you don't want to use daily billing, then you can still just bill once a month on the first of the month. The automation works well for both methods. In Misc Setup, you can set Aging to follow a monthly cycle instead of a daily cycle.

Dunning Messages
The right side of the window shows a list of optional dunning messages. A dunning message is a message that shows on each statement based on the age of the account and some other factors. Double click on an existing message or click add.

Dunning messages are currently only used in batch billing, and will not be triggered if you print a Statement individually from the Account module.

Create the List
Once you have your options set, click the Create List button.

Normally, of course, the list would be longer than this sample. All the rows will start out as highlighted and you would normally just click the Send button. But, sometimes, you might want to only print a few bills, so you can manually select which rows to print. You can leave this window in order to work on individual accounts.  The items in this list will show in individual accounts as statements that have been created but not sent.

At the top is a pair of radio buttons that will let you switch to the list of sent bills.  This will allow you to "unsend" them if something went wrong during the printing process.  Highlight all the bills that you want to "unsend", and click the Edit Selected button at the right.  Keeping in mind that you are editing all selected bills as a group, uncheck the Sent box.  Then return to the normal list view.  If you can't find the bill you are looking for, make sure the date range is inclusive enough.

When you click the send button, it will bring up an Adobe Acrobat pdf file of the entire batch for preview.  You will do the actual printing by clicking the print button that is in Acrobat (or Reader or any other suitable pdf viewer).

E-Mail
If you are sending some bills by email, you will see them intermingled with the bills that are being printed.  You can "Send" the entire batch as a whole.  Those that need to be e-mailed will be e-mailed, and those that need to be printed will become part of the printed batch.  If an e-mail address is missing, then that bill will be cleanly skipped and you will be notified.

The way to indicate ahead of time which patients are to get their bills by e-mail is to change their billing type.  First, set up an "e-mail" billing type in Definitions.  When adding the billing type, set the second box to "E" to indicate it's an e-mail billing type.  Then, in the Patient Edit window, change the billing type for the family to your newly created billing type.

Monthly Billing Reports

As part of a monthly process, you should run all the monthly reports, especially the Aging report. As you review old accounts, change their billing type from standard to precollections so that you can run a separate aging report of accounts that need to be followed up on. Note that your billing types may be different depending on how you set them up in Definitions.

Precollections: A second aging report can be run that has more restrictive settings to create a call list of accounts that require attention. For example, you could run a list with precollections billing type and with any balance. They will have already received a bill, but you now have a list of guarantors that need to be called. These types of calls should always be recorded in the Comm Log section of the Account module.

The rest of the monthly reports may then be run and followed up on over the next few weeks.