An account statement is an easy way to grab a summary of all (or some) of a patient's invoices and payments (including any money that might still be owing). When generating a statement, you'll see that you have a few different filtering options:
When the statement is generated, you'll see some additional fields that may or may not be populated: the previous balance, and the statement balance:
So, what are these, and what do they mean?
The previous balance is the total amount of all transactions that have taken place up until the start date of the account statement. In the example above, we can see that the previous balance is $125, and the dates of the statement are 30 April 2020 to 31 January 2021. The $125, in this case, means that as of 30 April 2020, this patient owed $125 to the clinic. This isn't a number that you need to worry about right now—it's meant to tell you that as of that particular date, the patient had a balance of $125 owing to the clinic. This might come in useful if you needed to know how much someone owed as of a certain date.
The statement balance is indicative of how much money was owing (or available to use towards future services) as of the statement's end date. In the example above, we can see that this patient has a negative -$400—this means that they have $400 of account credit available to use towards future services. If the number was positive, it would mean that they currently owe that much.
Let's take a look at the account statement as a whole. Below, we can see the brief summary at the top (in the same section as the address details). Then, we see the list of invoices for this time period, the list of payments for this time period, and the summary for this time period:
The invoices and payments sections are both pretty self-explanatory—these are the invoices that were issued during this time, and the payments that were entered. And, below this, you'll see the summary. This includes:
The previous balance (as mentioned above, this is the balance as of the starting date of this statement; it is most likely different as of today).
The total balance from invoices (what has been invoiced over the dates of this statement).
The total balance from payments (what payments have been entered over the dates of this statement).
The current statement balance (what is currently owing, or available to use as credit, as of the statement's end date—this may be either a positive or negative number).
Overall, it's important to remember that the account statement is a summary. It will not show, for example, how an invoice was paid, or which payment may have been allocated as account credit. It simply gives you a "snapshot" of the current state of a patient's account. and if you were looking to drill deeper into the information at hand, you would want to look at the individual invoices and payments.
If you have questions about how to navigate your patients' account statements, our support team can certainly help out! You can also read more about invoices and payments over here.