Month end, and the diary export
You have contracts with several local firms whose staff can book GP appointments paid for by the employer. At the end of each month, someone exports the diary, filters by the appointment type or note that says 'corporate', and works out which company each patient belongs to.
Some bookings are missing the tag, so they were charged to the patient or not at all. Some staff left the company months ago but are still booking under the contract. One firm pays per appointment, another has a monthly retainer with a cap, a third covers only its directors. The invoices take a day and a half and still contain mistakes the employer's finance team finds first.
Why employer billing is so fiddly
The contract rules live in a PDF and in the head of whoever set it up. Eligibility, meaning who currently works for the company, depends on a staff list the employer sends occasionally, if at all. The practice system records the appointment but not which contract it falls under.
Nothing checks eligibility at booking. Reception assume that if someone says they work for a firm, they do. The check happens weeks later, at invoice time, when it is too late to ask the patient to pay instead.
Confidentiality adds a layer. The employer is entitled to an invoice, not to know which clinical service an employee used, so the schedule has to be built carefully.
The cost of billing from the diary
| Issue | Result |
|---|---|
| Untagged corporate bookings | Appointments never billed to anyone |
| Leavers still booking | Disputed lines on the invoice |
| Cap exceeded unnoticed | Work done outside the contract, unpaid |
| Manual schedule building | A day or more of admin every month |
| Too much detail shared | A confidentiality concern with the employer |
How we connect contracts to the diary
- Each corporate client gets a contract record: pricing model, caps, who is covered and how eligibility is confirmed.
- Staff lists can be uploaded by the employer through a simple secure form, or eligible staff can verify with a company email address when they register.
- When a booking is made for an eligible patient, it is tagged to the contract at that point, and reception see a warning if the person is not on the current list or the cap is reached.
- At month end, invoices are drafted in Xero or QuickBooks per contract, with a schedule showing only what you agree the employer may see, such as dates and staff reference numbers.
- Anything uncertain, such as a booking for someone recently removed from a staff list, goes on a review list for a person before the invoice is sent.
What an employer is allowed to see is your decision, taken with your own adviser. The system enforces whatever you set, consistently.
What month end looks like after
The finance person reviews drafted invoices and a short exceptions list instead of building everything from an export. Reception know at the moment of booking whether the employer is paying. Employers get invoices that match their own staff lists, so there are fewer queries. When a contract is renewed, you have real usage figures from your own data to discuss.
It also makes new contracts easier to take on. Setting up another employer becomes a matter of filling in its contract record and inviting its staff to verify, not adding another set of rules to someone's memory. The more corporate clients you have, the more that matters, because the manual approach gets worse with every one you add.
Is your corporate billing like this?
- Employer invoices are built from a diary export every month
- Some corporate appointments have been missed off invoices
- You rely on patients to say who their employer is
- Contract caps are checked, if at all, at invoice time
- Employers query invoice lines you cannot quickly explain