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Physical therapy invoice template for Administration

over the next seven weeks on my YouTube channel I am going to be taking you through a mini course of the Private Practice workflow now what is a private practice workflow basically what it is is all of the admin procedures for your client Journey from start to finish so if you think about everything that you need to do for a client from when they first inquire with you until they finish with you all of the procedures in there are what I call the Private Practice workflow and there are seven so the first one is the inquiry the second one is on boarding the third one are the regular bookings the fourth one is communication the fifth one is invoicing the sixth one is client reports or client notes and the seventh one is offboarding I'm going to do one video for each of these areas and I'm going to help you create your own private practice workflow your own client Journey for your private practice this is going to be really valuable and and I would really love for you to start at the beginning so whether you're on video 2 video 3 video 5 I want you to go back and start from video one it's going to really help you put everything in order so that you can create this for your own practice I'm also going to create a mini course out of this so I'll leave a link in the description once it's created you'll be able to click the link and log on on thinkific so that you can go through the course and it will have all of the resources that I talk about Allin one place so you don't have to sign up for all the different free resources CU I go through quite a lot in each of the videos so let's get started right away and in this video we are going to be talking about invoicing this is how I got started working with therapist in private practice for the first three or four clients I worked with all I did when I first started was invoicing it was the first thing that they thought about Outsourcing because it's really admin heavy it also brings up things around your own money mindset and your own money struggles when it comes to invoicing clients I think it's also why a lot of therapists have such big low fee programs so where they set a certain rate for their practice but then a lot of f clients end up paying less than that because if somebody asks for a discount or says they can't afford it you you know you're in a profession that is caring and wants to help people and so generally you will let people pay less than you really need so I think the thought of Outsourcing the majority of this is really appealing but you can make some decisions for yourself up front before you start working with clients in private practice or when you're getting all of your practice organized in order to mitigate some of these problems so I'm not going to talk about fee setting and things like that in this video we are purely going to stick to invoicing but if you do still want to have a look at your fee and make changes to that I do have another video that I will link to all about how you can set a fee that you need so you can make sure that you're earning enough money when it comes to invoicing my number one tip the number one thing I tell everybody is to actually send a physical invoice and we're going to talk about how in a minute but my number one tip for making you look professional making sure you're getting paid on time and client not querying is to actually send a physical invoice rather than just expecting the client to remember to pay I have been in therapy many times and not once have I ever been sent an invoice from any of the therapists that I have worked with they have told me you know just pay me before you come to the session and most of the time I would forget nowadays we are sent reminders and all of that stuff so often that if we're not sent something it's just slips our mind and what would inevitably happen is that I would get on the session with the therapist and then be like oh my God I haven't paid you I'm so sorry but then by the time the session had finished I'd forget again and then it would come to the next week and then I'd owe two and it builds up and that also can make people stop coming to therapy if the therapy Bill builds up over time just because they forgotten not because they didn't have any intention of paying but then it becomes a much bigger problem and instead of owing for one session each week which is you know pretty manageable I'm sure if people have signed up for therapy they now start owing two or three or four sessions and it can become a big problem and that is why I would suggest to always send your clients an invoice yes it is more admin yes it feels more timec consuming but I promise you it's not going to be as time consuming as constantly chasing your clients for payments there are so many people that I have started working with who have told me that their clients are up to dat and things like that and then when I look back and look at their bookkeeping and how many sessions they've paid for there's always odd payments missing or sometimes people have even overpaid and the therapist has not noticed so if you have an invoicing system of some sort then you'll be in much more control of your finances and you will know exactly where you are in terms of your client's payments I do have lots of resources all on invoicing so the first one is a free resource and it's the best way to invoice in private practice or something like that and it basically goes through the pro pros and cons of lots of things that I'm going to talk about today if you would like to stick with a manual invoicing system I also have invoicing templates which is an actual invoice template but it also comes with an invoice log so that you can keep track of invoices and payments so you don't miss any payments or don't you know accept duplicate payments from clients so if you'd like to look at those resources they will be in the description below so let's first think about when you are going to invoice your clients do you want to invoice on a session by session basis would you like to invoice in advance for like maybe a month of sessions at a time or maybe retrospectively for what clients you have seen in the previous month or maybe you'd like to invoice in blocks so maybe you'd like to invoice for six sessions at a time these are all ways that you can invoice in private practice and within my client base we use all of these so some of them do session by session some of them invoice a month in advance some of them invoice retrospectively and some invoice in blogs you can also choose to do different things with different clients in your practice as well so you don't have to stick to a one siiz fits all if that doesn't work for you or your clients but I would suggest trying to find one way that works best for the majority so that you're not kind of invoicing all the time and in that free resource I was talking about I go through in depth the pros and cons of all of that so I will link to that in the description or if you're watching this on the free course you will have that in the resource section the next thing you want to think about is how you are going to invoice so you can invoice manually you can use an invoicing platform like stripe or PayPal for some people you can use your bank so for example if you're using Starlin you can upgrade to the business toolkit and then you can invoice your clients directly from your bank account you can invoice them from your accounting software so if you're using QuickBooks or zero or Sage you'll be able to invoice your clients through that and you can also invoice your clients if you are using an EHR so if you're using a system like power diary every time you book an appointment on the system it's going to automatically create an invoice which is amazing because because it takes a lot of admin out of your hands what I would suggest is if you are choosing to invoice manually I wouldn't do that on a session by session basis just because you are going to have to invoice every single week and create all these manual invoices and if you've got quite a large practice that's going to take you quite a lot of time also if you're invoicing manually there isn't a pay link where somebody can just easily pay you so they're going to do probably a backx transfer or if you're seeing them face to face and you accept cash they're going to give you cash and that can get really messy because you again are constantly having to check who's paid mark it off and things like that so if you are using my manual invoice templates or your own I would highly suggest invoicing in monthly session so you invoice for the whole month in advance or invoice for the whole month retrospectively so at the end of the month you'll see okay who did I see this month and then invoice them just for that one time also if you're only accepting back payments that can be quite annoying for clients to have to remember to go online and send the money to you whereas if you are sending them a pay link then they can just click a link and make the payment and it's much easier so you do also want to think about how easy it is for clients to pay you because the easier and more convenient it is the higher chances that you're going to get paid on time as I've said I've worked with therapist client since 2016 and I and invoicing is one of my specialities I would say and so in my experience the people that get paid on time and without kind of issues are people that have really strong invoicing procedures people that follow up regularly so for example I do manual invoicing for one of my clients we invoice at the end of the month for the following month and if people haven't paid three days past the due date we will send reminders and we'll constantly send reminders to people until they make the payment and so generally we have about maybe 15% of people that don't pay on time out of that 15% you know 10% of those will then pay on the first reminder and then the last 5% which is maybe like one or two clients just need that second reminder and then they'll pay and we always know where we are with these payments thanks to the invoicing log so I can always match up a payment to the invoice and it's really clear so no payments are ever missed and if there are any duplicate payments we can pick up really really quickly so that brings me on to the third part of invoicing which is how are you going to accept payments so you can accept cash if you are working face Toof face with clients I think this has major drawbacks because you are going to have to put that money in the bank so you're going to have to do Bank runs which if your town is anything like mine inperson banks are completely closing down I think we now have one in kind of like a 10 mile radius so there's only one bank that I can go to to put money in and then that bank is inevitably busier because everybody within my town needs to go to that one bank and so I'm spending more time there so that is why I personally would not accept cash for any payments you also need to make note that that person has paid somewhere and that would be separate from another way that you are checking that people have paid so it's just another thing to remember you can accept backs which is a bank transfer so somebody just trans transfering the money directly from their Bank to your bank so you can definitely accept back transfers you can do online payments so if you have set up stripe or PayPal or your EHR or another way of people being able to click a link and make a payment that is a way that you can accept payments and you can also accept payments where you have a card machine and people physically you know pay with their card like they would do in a shop or for the hairdresses or something like that if you are seeing people in person so there are lots of ways that you can accept payments I would probably stick to two ways so I would suggest doing an online payment of some kind whether that's for your EHR stripe your accounting system somewhere that people could click a link and pay and I would also accept back transfers as well and this means that you have to do less manual checking so for example if you use stripe and you create all your invo for the month you can then really easily check any past due payments and you can see what hasn't been paid and you can easily just resend them the invoice with a note saying you know it looks like this has been missed can you please make the payment at your earliest convenience if you're also accepting backs you would need to check your bank account to see if anybody has paid that way and then you would have to manually update the invoice to say that it has been paid but it does give people another option because in my experience some people just prefer to pay that way it really is up to you if you allow that or not but I would suggest offering them a couple of ways because I just think that again the easier and more convenient it is the better for you you may also be worried about changing your invoicing procedure and let me just say that every single person we have worked with whether we've done an online setup for them whether we've just taken over their invoicing or whether we've started working with them dayto day we have always introd uced an invoicing procedure and sometimes that has meant big changes so once we moved a therapist who was charging people on the session by session basis they wanted to stick to manual invoicing so in order to do that we really needed to invoice a month in advance that was a conversation so the therapist had a conversation with clients in the session to advise why this was happening we Then followed up with what the procedure was we gave them notice as well so for the first month we asked people to pay twice so we invoiced them for two sessions and then two sessions in the middle of the month and then we moved to the monthly invoicing but what I would say just to reassure you is that whenever you want to change a procedure in your practice as long as that is communicated to your clients as long as it makes sense for you or them so as long as you can justify why this is happening and as long as you are consistent with it people generally do not mind you might get the odd one who you know isn't happy about a certain thing but realistically if it's going to work better for you as a business and for the majority of your clients it's worth it if you are working with medical insurance that is a whole another board game I do have a video on how we invoice insurers and I've worked with medical insurance for the exact amount of time that I have worked with therapists so I've really built up a good system for how to invoice medical insurers how to consistently check that they're being paid get the remittance for them chase up any excess payments and things like that so that nothing is missed because when it comes to medical insurance if you are not on top of it you can very easily lose money so I'm going to link to that video I'm not going to talk about that in this video but I just wanted to mention medical insurance especially if you are in the UK I don't know how the insurance system works anywhere else but in the UK if you're working with private medical insurers um I will leave a link to that video so that you can follow my complete invoicing procedure I feel like this is a great start to invoice in it's definitely something to get you thinking about which is the when are you going to invoice how are you going to invoice and how are you going to accept payments if you get those three things right you can very easily build an invoice in procedure in the next video we are going to be talking about client notes and reports so I'll see you in that one and thanks so much for [Music] watching