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Accountants that work with healthcare practitioners and medical groups understand the complexities that come with this unique sector. These clients, including offices of physicians, optometrists and dentists, can face a challenging environment to practice. Every moment these professionals spend thinking about the back office takes away from their work with patients.
Accounting firms with in-depth knowledge of this sector can help medical groups and healthcare practitioners thrive by instituting best practices, benchmarks, technologies, advice, and more. Now, there’s another way you, as their accountant, can help healthcare clients unlock rewards and rebates to fuel their cash flow: spend management.
Spend management for the offices of physicians, optometrists, and dentists
Spend management is the ability to view, control, and manage aspects of a medical group’s cash flow like expenses, bill pay, budgeting, and credit and virtual cards. It relies on real-time data in a centralized location and provides actionable insights for decision makers.
What is considered spend? Beyond what is traditionally thought of as expenses like travel and lodging, spend can include:
- Medical supplies
- Software subscriptions
- Paid online ads
- Website hosting services
- Utilities
- Office supplies
Spend management can unite all sorts of spend - including expenses and vendor payments - into one solution. It does this by combining corporate cards and technology to enforce budgets and optimize incentives like cash-back rewards and rebates.
Medical groups can use spend management to pay their vendors, capturing higher rebates and more cash-back rewards. And as their accountant, you can capture an in-depth view of all spend, help enforce budgets, and offer valuable resources like virtual cards.
“Utilizing BILL Spend & Expense with our vendors added flexibility for my AP team to pay vendors with less than 30-day payment terms quickly, and reduced annual expenses by a meaningful amount (approximately 800K) with our cash back rebates.” - Jen Morgan CFO, Senta Partners
Card-based spend management in action
Spend management for medical groups all starts with budgets.
Budgets for offices, departments, teams, projects, or individuals are set and budget owners determine who can use that money. Authorized spenders can be issued a physical or virtual charge card2 that is mapped to their budgets. Budget owners can assign limits on how much each person can spend and deactivate cards in a few short steps. Once an employee hits the limit of their card, they can no longer use it for purchases without receiving permission/budget to continue. Your client can issue as many corporate or virtual cards as needed.
During this process, accounting firms can determine how they want to interact with their clients’ spend management. Some prefer to create new service opportunities by consulting on budgets and software. Some prefer to get their clients up and running with it, with their clients handling day-to-day and accountants focused on advisory services.
When someone spends on behalf of their medical group with their corporate or virtual card, two things happen immediately:
- Spenders get prompted to upload the receipt. The transactions can be automatically coded, relieving you and your client from data entry and ensuring everyone has proper documentation.
- The charge appears in real-time on your client’s spend dashboard, giving up-to-date visibility into every penny leaving the organization. Additionally, the spend management software integrates with Quickbooks Online, Sage Intacct, and Oracle NetSuite, speeding up the time to close.
If a staff member needs more budget, they can request how much and why via a mobile app, online, or even Slack. The budget owners can approve or deny it as soon as they get the request.
In the context of a medical group, this means your client can delegate budgets across offices or branches. You can also use virtual cards to manage individual clinic offices for easy, automated coding, and management can quickly allocate funds out to individual clinics as needed.
How spend management can help your clients’ cash flow
Your medical group client can get cash-back rewards2 for spend on the spend management corporate cards.
That means instead of rewards going to individual card holders, they are given to your client’s company. Which leads to more benefits that suit your healthcare clients - maximizing rebates by using spend management virtual cards to pay large bills.
Your client can issue as many virtual cards as needed. The cards can be used for different offices, individuals, or vendors, and charges run through them can lead to cash-back rewards.
Your client can issue a virtual card for each vendor, limiting exposure of their credit information and enforcing the budgets allocated to them.
Your spend management technology can step in to streamline payment processes, handling the manual work of processing payments and remittance for large invoices—all while offering rewards on that spend. An ideal spend management provider already has familiarity with large medical vendors such as McKesson and Medline. And reconciliation is accelerated because transactions are already coded.
With the flexibility of the virtual card payments, you can also guide your clients to take advantage of potential discounts or rebates for these high-dollar payments.
Ready to introduce your medical group clients to spend management?
Learn more about BILL Spend & Expense. BILL Spend & Expense is completely free to use. Every feature is always available to your clients, with no extra costs or hidden fees.
*See respective offers for terms.
