Overview
This article addresses how to move payments/outstanding credits from one patient's chart and apply them to another patient's balance. For instance, you may have processed a payment on a patient's account for a higher amount than she had owed. Instead of partially refunding that payment, you may want to use it to pay an outstanding bill on her child's (or any other person's) account.
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Details
The most straight-forward way to move excess credit from one account to another is to add Adjustment charges to each patient's account. For context, Adjustment charges are pre-built charges that you may apply to patient balances to correct discrepancies. Using Adjustment charges is not necessarily the best route in all cases.
In the following example, we will transfer $300 from patient Rhea King's (parent) account to her son, Zeus King's (child) account.
Start by adding an Adjustment to the parent's account. To do so, navigate to the parent's chart, and in the yellow billing block, click on the add charge/payment button. This will bring up the window shown below. In the search box, start typing "Adjustment", and then click on it when it appears.
In the "Add Adjustment" window (example shown below), enter the amount that you want to transfer, (the amount MUST be positive). Add a note about why you're adjusting their balance, and click the "Add Adjustment to Pt Account" button:
Once you've done this, the parent account, Rhea's in this example, will have an overall balance of $200 but she'll still have $500 in "Unallocated Credit". Just allocate some of that credit towards the adjustment charge. Her billing block should now look like this:
Now we just need to apply an Adjustment to the receiving/child (Zeus') account. Open the 'add adjustment' window via the yellow billing block and enter the amount of the adjustment (the amount MUST be negative). Include a note about why you're adjusting their balance, and click the 'Add Adjustment to Pt Account' button:
You'll now see that Zeus has a zero dollar balance, and you just need to allocate the adjustment to cover his outstanding charges:
Perfect! We've now transferred money from Rhea's account onto Zeus's account in a way that will make it clear where the money came from. Note that this will NOT count as a new deposit in the End of Day Report or Income report (because no new money was collected) but it will show on an allocation report and will show the adjustment in its own category as a charge in the End of Day report.
This article was originally published on March 9th, 2020, and most recently edited on June 15th, 2021.
Additional Keywords: apply credit to another patient, move payments between accounts, adjustment charges