Knowledgebase Article
Category: Training | Module: OfficePro | Created: 10/11/2024 | Last Updated: 9/5/2026
Money is taken against an encounter, in the Payments & Discounts area. Everything a patient owes, pays, or is forgiven is recorded there, and everything is recorded against a code so it can be reported on later.
Enter the payment type into the payment search box - either its code or its name, so both CA and Cash find the same thing. Then enter the Amount.
The usual types are Cash, Check, Credit Card Payment, ACH Payment and Insurance Payment. Depending on the type you will be asked for a Check Number, an Approval Code or an Auth Number - fill these in. They are what lets you match a payment to a bank statement or a card settlement three months later, and reconstructing them afterwards is painful.
Receiving Agent records who took the money, and Payment Note is free text for anything unusual about it.
Discounts go in the same way, through the Discounts & Adjustments search box. Choose from Common Discount Percentages saves working out the arithmetic for a standard percentage off.
Practices typically have Doctor Discount, Family Discount, Senior Discount, Trade, Insurance Adjustment and Write Off. They behave identically in the software - the difference is entirely in what they tell you afterwards.
That difference matters more than it looks. A Senior Discount is a pricing decision you chose to make; a Write Off is revenue you failed to collect; an Insurance Adjustment is the difference between what you charged and what the payer allows. All three reduce the balance by the same amount and mean completely different things about how the practice is doing. Using Write Off as a catch-all makes the Discounts Given report useless.
The available codes are fixed for the practice. If you need one that does not exist, contact NaturaeSoft support rather than pressing an existing code into service - the code is what the reporting is built on.
This is the part that most often causes confusion. Taking a payment and applying it to a visit are two separate things. A payment can sit unallocated - the patient has paid, but the money has not yet been attached to what it was for.
Use Allocate Payment to spread a payment across visits. The screen shows the payment's Available amount, a list of Visits with Outstanding Balances, and what each visit's balance Becomes once you apply the amount you have entered. Unallocated: shows what is left over.
A single payment can be split across several visits, and one visit can be settled by several payments. That is normal - a patient paying off an account in instalments produces exactly that.
Unallocated Payments lists money taken but not yet applied. Work through it regularly. An unallocated payment makes the patient look like they still owe money they have already handed over, which is how a practice ends up chasing someone who has paid.
A patient can end up in credit - they overpaid, or a return put value back on their account. Credit can be left to cover a future visit or given back with Process Patient Refund.
Decide which before allocating anything. If you intend to refund a credit, do not allocate it against a payment first - allocate it and it has been spent, and the refund becomes a separate piece of work.
Returning a product does not create an ordinary credit. It records a credit of $0.00 and puts the returned value on the return visit as a negative amount. That negative is not a side effect - it is the credit.
So if you are looking at a return in the allocation screen and see a negative row, leave it alone. Removing it would delete the credit and leave the return visit unpaid at the same time. OfficePro blocks that and explains why if you try.
To take a credit back so it can go somewhere else, untick the visit you applied it to. If the return itself was the mistake, reverse the return rather than its credit.