🏦 Remittances, Deposit Verification and Connecting Bank Accounts – Athelas

At a Glance

In the world of medical billing, perhaps the two most important questions you can answer are:

How much have payers told us we’ve been reimbursed?

How much of that has actually arrived in our bank account?

Getting a clear answer to #1 can be challenging enough, but some practices are forced to spend tremendous amounts of time manually matching up bank deposits with EOBs in order to make sense of what they’ve been paid and find out what payments are missing.

It’s important work, but it’s also a slog.

That’s why Athelas has a Remittances tab, with built-in deposit verification.

In this tab you’ll be able to view a list of every remittance a payer has sent you. Once you plug in your bank account via our secure Plaid integration we’ll attempt to automatically match those remittances up with deposits, reducing the burden of deposit verification by as much as 80%.

Read on, and we’ll dig into the details.

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Best Practices 1. While Athelas will be able to automatically match the majority of your remits/deposits, some portion will still need to be manually matched. For this reason it’s worth reviewing your unmatched remittances/deposits at least every 2 weeks to keep the volume of unmatched pairs manageable. 2. Often remittances will arrive a few days before payments hit the bank, so for any remittances younger than 5 days old, don’t be too worried if there’s no corresponding deposit in your bank account just yet. 3. When you deposit multiple checks at once, your bank will usually sum them all up into a single deposit which makes it hard to match them against individual remittances. When you’re looking for payments that correspond to orphaned remittances, this is often a good place to start.

🌐 Core Feature Walkthrough

1. View All Remittances

Even before you connect your bank account, you’ll be able to view a list of all your recent remittances in chronological order (or a different order if you care to re-sort them).

There can be a lot of data in this view, so we’ve provided tools to help you zoom in on precisely what you’re trying to examine:

Download CSV — for some folks, there’s no place like Excel. If you happen to be a spreadsheet jockey, you’ve got the option to download all the data in this tab. That way you can work in your data manipulation tool of choice.

Filter Remittances — we’ve also provided a wide variety of filters to help you narrow down to just the subset of remittances you’re looking for. This is particularly helpful when investigating missing deposits.

Explore Remittance Details — once you’ve found a remittance you want to examine, clicking on it will take you into a detail view for the remittance. Here you can see each Athelas claim that was a component of the remittance.

Quicklink to Athelas Claim — and to close the loop, clicking any of the specific claims listed in the ERA will open up the Athelas Claim Detail view so you can see remittance info in the context of the rest of the claim details.

2. Connect Your Bank Account

Once you’re ready to start automatically matching remittances and deposits we’ll need to connect to your bank account via the Athelas <> Plaid integration. Here’s how to do it:

From the main Remittances tab, click the ‘Connect Bank Accounts’ button. This will take you to the linked accounts screen.

From the linked accounts screen you can view any currently associated bank accounts, then click ‘Connect a new Bank Account’ to add a new one.

This will launch the Plaid integration screen which will guide you through the process of authenticating with your bank. Once you’re done, read-only access will be delivered to Athelas for analysis.

Once you’ve completed the connection it may take as much as an hour for data to be fully imported and matching to occur. Once an hour has passed, you can move on to analyzing your matches and mismatches.

Note: If you have more than one bank account you’d like to match against remittances, just repeat the process from the top. You can link as many bank accounts as you like.

Refreshing or Deleting a Bank Account

To refresh or remove an account, simply click Manage Bank Accounts on the Remittances page, then click either the Refresh or Delete icon for that account.

3. Analyze Matches / Missing Deposits

Now that your bank account is hooked up and Athelas has had time to run our algorithmic matching protocol, the fun really begins. You now have 5 different ways to segment your data, depending on your objective:

View All — in this view you’ll see a combination of both remittances and deposits. Any that have been matched will appear combined into a single line item, but you’ll also see rows for unmatched remittances and unmatched deposits.

Missing ERAs — here you’ll see any deposit for which Athelas couldn’t find a corresponding remittance to match it to.

Missing Payment — on the flip side, this view shows remittances with no payments that could be directly matched to them

Inconsistencies — here Athelas was able to match a remittance to a deposit, but there’s some discrepancy between the two.

Generally this a difference in payment amount (often only a few cents), but each row will specify that the inconsistency in the match is.

Matched Deposits — as you might expect, this view holds all our unproblematic matches where a remittance clearly belongs with a given deposit and the numbers all line up nicely.

In Conclusion

With these tools in hand, the process of tracking down missing payments and missing remittances becomes a lot simpler, and as Athelas continues to refine our matching algorithm there will be more and more matches generated automatically.

We aim to one day provide a 99% match rate, so if you recognize matches that Athelas isn’t detecting automatically please bring those to your account representative. We’ll use that data to improve our algorithm and provide better results going forward.

💬 FAQs

What should I do if my bank doesn’t integrate with Plaid?

Reach out to your dedicated Athelas representative and they’ll see if we can manage an alternate method of importing your deposit list. Occasionally this isn’t possible, but often we’re able to find a suitable workaround.