How to Assess Accounting Alternatives: 8 Items to Check Off Your List

Accounting is a critical task for any organization. Understanding how to assess accounting alternatives can be even more complicated for healthcare firms. The bottom line still matters, but so do patient satisfaction, insurance compliance, and other factors. They're all related, so when you consider an accounting alternative for your business, you must also consider how it might impact and integrate with everything else. 

How to Assess Accounting Alternatives for Healthcare Organizations

Ensure your next accounting solution lives up to the hype by including the following eight factors in your checklist when reviewing potential vendors or software.

1. Accounting Vendor's Experience in Your Niche

Maintaining financial stability during the COVID-19 pandemic — or working to recover from revenue hits — represents a big challenge for many healthcare organizations. But healthcare accounting challenges didn't start with (and will not end with) COVID-19. Businesses in this niche have faced growing patient and regulatory demands for decades alongside slower or potentially smaller revenue streams.

Accounting solutions that are designed with those challenges in mind are most likely to support success and help healthcare providers overcome revenue-based challenges. Ensuring your vendor of choice is familiar with the healthcare financial landscape is important. 

2. Integration Capabilities for Accounting Alternatives

Integrating an EHR and medical billing system helps speed up reimbursement. But the need for integration doesn't stop there. General ledger systems that integrate with practice management and billing solutions help you manage your overall bottom line in a more efficient fashion. Improved accounting leads to benefits such as cost savings and efficiencies, improved compliance, and reduced AR days.

3. Provides a Scalable Financial Solution

In 2010, approximately 49% of people in the U.S. didn't have health insurance. By 2020, that number had dropped to around 30%.

More people holding insurance cards means potentially more patients making appointments or showing up at clinics. It also means more insurance billing to attend to, and scaling up a practice of any size leads to demands on procurement, invoicing, accounts payable, and inventory management.

In short, if you're poised to grow — or want to be in that position — you need accounting solutions that support and grow with you.

4. Supports Core Accounting Tasks

Accounting solutions should support core accounting tasks such as the general ledger, invoice processing, accounts receivable, report generation, and accounting automation.

Outside of some core features, such as general ledger capability, the needs you have for an accounting solution may vary. Before vetting alternative accounting options, consider creating a business requirements list. Work with subject-matter experts in your organization to decide what an accounting solution absolutely must do for you. Compare that list to software features when reviewing options.

5. Accounting Alternatives Meet Needs for Accessibility

Can employees access the solution remotely? Does that matter for your organization? Decide whether you need cloud-based solutions or desktop solutions that only work on local machines.

The flip side of this consideration is control of accessibility. Financial data is always sensitive, and HIPAA and other regulations up the ante on confidentiality and privacy in the healthcare field. The ability to control access to your accounting systems and data by user or role can help you maintain compliance and protect both business and patient data.

6. Backed by the Right Level of Support

You might have in-house tech teams, but they probably aren't experts on your chosen accounting solution. Getting the right level of support from your vendor is critical to ensuring future success with any technical product. Some questions to ask when thinking about support include:

• Does the vendor offer support for implementing the product?

• Will the vendor provide help with integrating existing systems?

• Is ongoing support and troubleshooting an option?

• Can the vendor offer training for your IT department or accounting staff?

• What type of support is offered — for example, in-person, phone, chat, or email?

• Does the vendor provide knowledge management documentation on its site or via other methods?

7. Comes With Robust Accounting Reporting Functions

Reporting is an integral part of improving medical billing processes, and you know you can't handle accounting in general without reports. From balance sheets and tax documents to custom payer reports, understand what you need and ensure the solution you're considering offers it.

8. Supports Security and Compliance in Accounting Alternatives

Healthcare providers, CFOs, and others involved in accounting in the industry are well aware of the burden of compliance. With new laws about medical billing being discussed and signed constantly, working with a vendor that supports compliance is critical. They can help ensure all technologies coordinate with requirements and even build future updates that align with new regulations.

At the same time, you also want to consider the solution's security. Encryption, strong passwords that include multi-factor authentication options, and logging when users access or make changes to accounting information may all be necessary. Work with your CIO or other tech resources to determine what security features any accounting alternative should have.

How TempDev Can Help

TempDev partners with healthcare organizations to optimize NextGen use. Our consultants bring expertise and knowledge to an implementation to help you check off every item on this list as you integrate an accounting alternative into your practice. Schedule a consultation with TempDev today.