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Effective Financial Oversight Helps You Avoid Unpleasant Surprises!

January 14th 2022

In a previous post, we indirectly discussed the sensitive topic of financial fraud. To get the year off to a good start, I'll go over some basics that might keep you from getting into serious trouble.

To set the table, here are the key points from our first article:

  1. There is a direct link between the rigour and discipline with which you manage your financial information and its degree of exposure to fraud. Your software must make it possible to check the accuracy and reliability of your financial data and explain any unjustified spreads where necessary.

    In short, software that allows you to change financial information directly without a trace is unreliable.e.

  2. As owners and managers of your offices, you must maintain some control over their financial information by checking it periodically.

  3. If you cannot perform the periodic, at least monthly, audit of your financial data yourself, we strongly suggest you entrust this task to an external party, such as your accountant.

    It should take one or two hours at most per month to make all the basic checks. It will allow you to detect suspicious items. Then, all you have to do is get the required explanations.

If you use CTRL/Clinic or CTRL/Finance, here a few techniques you can regularly use to help you avoid nasty surprises:

  • Use the function that allows you to make sure that your schedule and invoicing match on a given day or in a given period. All irregularities should be checked.

  • Use the review report function on your patient treatment files to isolate the unbilled treatments (e.g.: staggered, partial invoicing, etc.). Since all treatments are usually immediately billed in full amounts, the total amounts for the treatments that are in the process of being invoiced should always be minimal. All large total amounts should be checked, which is easy to do because you already have a detailed list of the patients and treatments concerned on hand.

  • All items and invoices with zero amounts in the daily fee report should be checked. This type of information shows that an invoice and equivalent credit were issued on the same date. This may simply be due to an invoicing mistake, but it can also hide a very dubious method of processing the information.

  • Print out a weekly report of the fees, or create a PDF version, and keep it on file. At the end of each month, print out the same report (same period) to compare the totals you have obtained. Any difference results from transactions performed in a given week after that week is over and should be examined.

  • Ideally, configure the software so that it is impossible to issue an invoice or a credit before the date concerned. That way, any correction will appear on the report from the day in question, and you can check it, if necessary. Here, we are assuming that all managers check their fee report on a daily basis.

  • If you use Progident/Finance, you enjoy greater protection because:

- The bank reconciliation function is very effective in detecting irregularities. A balance in the account statement of your banking institution that differs from the computer balance in the corresponding bank account at the end of the month should be examined. If you do not perform the bank reconciliation yourself, ask to see the two amounts on the screen.

- Use the accounts receivable report from CTRL/Clinic to compare the total accounts receivable balance in CTRL/Finance at the end of the month. All spreads should be checked.

- Also compare your accounts receivable balance at the end of the fiscal year in order to detect any abnormal increase over the previous year. A substantial increase should be explained by an increase in your income or a major change in the range of services you offer (e.g.: new health services that are paid in instalments). If that is not the case, dig deeper to find the explanation.

- Once the month’s business has come to an end, close the accounting period concerned. That way, it is impossible to enter transactions in order to hide ill-intentioned adjustments. Clearly, only you should have the access rights to change the status of an accounting period.

  • Last but not least: CTRL software products have a special user code (GERSYS) that requires managers to set a password when they are installed. This code gives them special rights that should be granted to managers only. As for users, make sure that that they do not share their user code or password with others because that will automatically reduce the effectiveness of the traceability system built into the software.

Contact us to learn more about this topic or how CTRL protects you.

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