Checking your Daily Deposits
Are you balancing your deposits? Is the money you have entered in your practice management system the same amount that is getting deposited in the bank?
Many offices are not balancing the deposits at the end of every day.
When this happens, it makes balancing at the end of the month difficult for the business owner and accountant.
Every practice management system has some sort of deposit slip report that can be created at the end of the day. The report will separate out checks, cash, credit cards and any other payment types that are entered into the system. Run this report at the end of every day.
Each day should have its own deposit that goes to the bank. This means at the end of the day; you create a deposit slip with all of the checks and cash and total it up. There should never be half of yesterday and half of today on one deposit. Keep it simple for yourself and the accountant.
When having a separate deposit per day, it will be much easier to balance. You can still take a week in at a time if you want, but the deposits will go into the bank separately.
Credit card receipts should be balanced at the end of the day as well. Every merchant services company has a batch that your team will utilize to close the credit card transactions. Once the batch is run, total up the credit card slips and ensure they match up.
If your team is balancing the deposits daily, the balancing for the doctor or accountant at the end of every month should be an easy process. It still needs to be done though. There should be verification that the deposits that were entered all month have not changed and the monies in the bank are the monies that are showing on the patient accounts.
Electronic Fund Transfers, or EFTs are an area that we are seeing a real problem for offices and getting those to balance out. It requires seeing if the money has been deposited in the bank and if the amounts are correct. Therefore, it is harder for the team to balance those numbers daily. Please ensure that the funds are truly going in your bank account and that the month balances for those payments. We started with an office that hadn’t been balancing the EFTs and turns out the money was going into another doctor’s account altogether. Insurance companies make mistakes too and this was a big one. They are now having to comb through over 18 months of claims and determine how much money is owed to our doctor. If either office was balancing their deposits, this would have been found much earlier.
If you are not balancing your deposits on a daily and monthly basis and don’t even know how to start, please send me an email at Janice@GTSgurus.com. I would be happy to get you on the road to successfully understanding your practice software, bank, and merchant statements. If this is not something you have time to do for yourself, we have a Risk Analysis and Management (RAM) program available. With this program, we review this information on a quarterly basis and let you know if there is anything not adding up to the amounts it should.
Janice Janssen, RDH, CFE, Consultant
At age 14, Janice Janssen got an after-school job working for her dentist. Twenty-something years later, she is the co-founder of Global Team Solutions and an expert in practice consulting. Besides hands-on experience, Janice has gained professional recognition for her hard work and commitment to excellence. She is co-author of OMG! Office Management Guide, the “bible” used in GTS training workshops. She is a member of the Academy of Dental Management Consultants (ADMC), and is a Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE), which positions her as an expert in educating dentists to deter fraud and embezzlement in their practice.
Janice can be reached at: janice@gtsgurus.com