It’s great when a patient pays cash – on the way out he or she produces a roll of £10 notes and pays in full. It happened just before Christmas last year to an MHM client.
Couple of items to remember, however.
1. The consultation still needs to be invoiced – unless of course, you want HMRC to raise serious eyebrows (and you DON’T!!)
2. The cash has to be accounted for
It was this second point that caused a wry smile.
A sanity check picked up the consultation and an invoice to the self-funding patient was sent. With the result a most irate patient phoned MHM. So where was the cash?
Being just before Christmas, the MHM client had gone out and bought some ad-hoc Christmas presents with it. He’d clean forgotten the extra £150 in his wallet was actually practice money. It should always be treated as completely separate from his own personal money and banked into the separate practice account he has as you should have too! But he’d forgotten.
Thus the MHM client today had to take out of his own bank account and pay into the practice account £150 prior to MHM emailing a receipted invoice to the patient.
It was a very nice bottle of Merlot though – I really enjoyed it.
pete@medicalhealthcaremanagement.co.uk