Gain without Pain: Using QuickBooks to Manage Healthcare
To Order, Call Sales
(888) 236-9501
Community
Order Status
View Cart
Search This Site
Practice Resources
Accounting Articles
Events Schedule & Downloads
Gain without Pain: Using QuickBooks to Manage Healthcare
Intuit ProConnection
By: Scott Cytron, ABC, and Kelly Kleinsteuber
Current Newsletter Enroll Subscriber Center Archive FAQs Resources Troubleshooting Articles
Today's healthcare solutions depend on an expanding group of professionals coming together to offer preventive medicine to the healthy and treat the unwell. Whether the practice is rooted in traditional medicine, dental and orthodontia, emergency services, or even cosmetic surgery, medical professionals must do everything they can to make their back offices more efficient. However, at the end of the day, the focus is usually on the patient - not the finances. Even if a practice is large enough to have an administrator or office manager, this person cannot know all the accounting-related nuances associated with running a smoothly functioning office.
Accounting Technology Practice Development Tax
Intuit ProConnection Really Simple You can bring these articles to your desktop as soon as they are published. Sign up for RSS nowSign up for RSS now Already a ProConnection subscriber? Update your profile and personalize your ProConnection experience. Update your profile Not a subscriber yet? Sign up now for free and start receiving customized newsletters directly to your inbox. Sign up now
Scott Cytron and Kelly Kleinsteuber recently spoke with Helen Zucker, an Advanced Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor who helps medical professionals make the most of QuickBooks to manage their businesses. A Change of Careers
Payroll Test Drives & Collateral Product Tips Request a Speaker/Trainer Financial Calculators Affiliate Program
How does a person go from obtaining a bachelor's degree in Human Development to becoming a QuickBooks Advanced ProAdvisor? Chalk it up to an aptitude for numbers and a desire to work with people. Helen Zucker didn't know she would end up in this capacity when she initially learned QuickBooks. At the time, she worked in an administrative position and knew she had to learn the program in order to keep up with the bookkeeping tasks. When a few friends who served as independent contractors with other businesses learned about her new QuickBooks' skills, they quickly enlisted her to balance their own books. Helen got more than she bargained for; one friend's account was $9,000 off. "I worked at the books until it made sense again - and I was hooked on the numbers," she says. "During this time, while I was doing other small bookkeeping jobs and taking some advanced accounting classes, Robin Wilson of Business Cents asked me to do bookkeeping work for her clients." That was five years ago and Helen has never looked back. Today, she is a full-time consultant at the San Anselmo-Calif. firm, working with small- and medium-size companies, many of which are healthcare entities. Applying it to Medical Offices Through the firm's "business systems consulting" practice, Helen works with clients to analyze their company's accounting processes, not only to streamline business procedures, but to find other industry-specific software packages to integrate with QuickBooks and other bookkeeping tasks. Often, this analysis leads her back to QuickBooks as an attractive solution to her clients in the medical industry because the software can be integrated with other programs. "You can download banking from insurance companies and billing services directly into the register to allow for upto-the-minute cash flow," she says. "QuickBooks also makes it possible to track income by source type and then use month-end reports to journal entry the income to either the physician or other type of practitioner." Based on the program's flexibility, Helen is continuously able to customize QuickBooks to a particular client. The Chart of Accounts includes traditional fixed asset, liability, equity, income and expense categories with accounts she creates just for a particular office. This includes, for example, lab fees, licenses and fees, medical supplies, patient refunds, transcription services and several other medically oriented areas. Helen finds that one of the most useful attributes of QuickBooks for medical offices is the ability to track income and expense by practitioner. This makes it simple for her to run a Profit and Loss by class to see not only an office's bottom line, but also if someone is not billing. "We discovered one practitioner's income had gone down even though he was not working less. As a result, we were able to track down what income had not yet gone through the billing service and ensure that the missing income was recouped."
file:///G|/Resume%20and%20such/Writing%20Samples/Article%20with%20Scott.htm[5/5/2009 11:52:47 AM]