The schedule arrives, and it is filed
Each month the payment schedule shows up. Item counts, fees, service payments, adjustments, advance payments and recoveries. It is a dense document, and the figures relate to dispensing from a couple of months earlier.
Checking it properly means going back to your own records for that month: how many items the PMR says were dispensed, which services were claimed, what was submitted and when. Most owners look at the total, compare it roughly with the previous month, and move on. If a service claim was missed, or an item count looks low, it rarely gets followed up.
Why the numbers are hard to line up
The schedule and your records are counting the same work in different ways and at different times. Your PMR records per prescription, day by day. Services may be recorded in a separate clinical platform. Submissions happen at month end. The schedule then arrives later, grouped and adjusted.
So a reconciliation is really three jobs: pulling your own figures for the right month from more than one system, putting them in the same shape as the schedule, and then comparing. Doing that manually each month is enough work that it gets skipped.
The cost of not checking
| Gap | Consequence |
|---|---|
| Service claims not submitted | Work was done but never claimed |
| Item count differences | Nobody asks why the schedule counted fewer items |
| Late queries | By the time a question is raised, the records are hard to find |
| No trend view | You cannot see income by service or month without rebuilding it |
We do not make judgements about what you are owed. That is between you, your accountant and the relevant bodies. What we do is make the differences visible so the right person can look.
A monthly reconciliation that builds itself
- Data collection from your own systems for each dispensing month: PMR item reports, service records from your clinical services platform, and your submission records, using exports or APIs where they exist.
- Schedule capture. The schedule, usually a PDF or download from the NHSBSA, is read and its lines extracted into a table.
- Line-up. Your figures and the schedule's figures are placed side by side under the same headings.
- Difference flags for anything beyond a tolerance you set, with the underlying records one click away.
- A service claims check that lists services recorded in your platform but not claimed, and claims without a matching record.
- A monthly summary your accountant can use, with income by service and by month.
Where a system cannot export what we need, we explain what is missing and suggest the least painful manual step.
What month end looks like after
When the schedule comes in, the comparison is already laid out. Most lines match. The ones that do not come with the records behind them, so a question can be raised quickly and with evidence. Service claims that were forgotten are caught before the claim window closes rather than months later.
Over time you also get a clean income history by service, which is useful for planning which services to push and which to drop.
Your accountant benefits too. Instead of a pile of schedules and a request to make sense of them, they receive a monthly summary that already lines up income with the work behind it, which makes year-end and any cash flow planning simpler.
Is this your month end?
- The payment schedule is checked by eye, if at all
- You are not sure every service you delivered was claimed
- Your dispensing records and service records live in different systems
- You could not quickly show income by service for the past year
- Queries about the schedule rarely get raised