PPS Cash Desk

Appointment
An Appointment is an entry in the Appointments Diary for a client. When you set up your diary, you are setting up the free appointment slots. You then book Appointments into these free slots. Each Appointment can be marked with a status, represented by a colour, to show that the client has arrived for their appointment (green), is currently being seen by the practitioner (orange) or the appointment is completed (purple). You can also mark an appointment as DNA (did not attend) and select a reason why the client has not attended – these are marked in red. When booking an appointment on the diary, this is normally done by highlight a free slot then selecting to add the new appointment. When doing this, the appointment details such as date, time, duration, diary user, treatment room, etc. are already known and you do not have to enter them.

Cash Desk
PPS Cash Desk is a “point-of-sale” type screen that can be used to quickly create charges, invoices and payments all in one step. You can access the Cash Desk screen directly from anywhere in PPS either from the PPS Menu: Accounts – Cash Desk, or by using the F11 key on the keyboard. When the screen displays, make sure that the client and practitioner are selected. If you launch Cash Desk by clicking on an appointment in the diary first, then these details will be shown already. The Cash Desk screen shows chargeable items (consultation fees or stock items) in the top right corner of the screen – There six “quick buttons” that show the first six items in your list. To access more items, use the <More> button. You can either click on one these buttons to select this charge item, or enter the charge code directly into the “Enter Code” field. When you have added as many charges as you want, then use the <Payment> button. The Six buttons in the top right now show your first six most common payment methods – use the <More> button to see further payment methods. Select the required payment method and confirm the payment amount. When you are done, you simply click the <Save> button, and select if you want to print and invoice/receipt. You can set up which charge code items appear in the list, and which payment methods appear in the list. To do this select from the PPS Menu: Tools – Look Up Tables, and select either the “List of Standard Charges and Stock Items” or “Payment Methods” table from the Accounts Tables section. Both of these have a “Cash Desk Order” entry that determines what order this item appears in the six quick buttons on the Cash Desk screen. You can also apply Discounts and use Vouchers on cash desk, and even use it to bill third parties, even after the client has paid a portion of the bill already.

Charge
A charge is the first step for PPS billing. You have to create a charge before you can raise an invoice – a charge is a “line item” on an invoice. Charges can be either for various types of treatment, or for stock/sundry items you may sell. PPS has a “list of standard charges” that you set up yourself giving you quick access to your charges via a code, or description. There are several ways in PPS that you can create a charge, you can also skip very quickly from creating a charge to recording a payment and PPS creates the invoice for you as you go. --br-- You can create a charge in the following ways (which way you regularly use will depend upon the way that you prefer to use PPS): 1) from the PPS Menu: Accounts – Create a Charge; 2) from the PPS Taskbar click on Create a Charge (if you have the diary open then highlighting an appointment first will create the charge related to that appointment); 3) from the PPS Menu: Accounts – Charges List, and click the New button; 4) from the diary, highlight an appointment, right-click on the appointment and select the Client Charge option from the pop-up menu; 5) when completing a consultation record, the “consultation complete” screen allows you to create the charge; 6) when completing an appointment the “appointment complete” screen allows you to create the charge; 7) Cash Desk can be used to create charges. The first four options above will show the Client Charge screen. This allows you to select / enter all the appropriate charge details and save the charge, or go on to create an invoice for the charge. An invoice can contain more than one charge so you do not always want to create the invoice each time. --br-- Whenever creating a charge, you have the option to select who will be invoiced for the charge, this includes the Client, and any one of the Third-Part Contacts associated with the client. This is how to bill an insurance company directly, for example. If the client does not have a third party contact associated with them, then you can select one while creating the charge, and select to always associate this third-part with the client. This will update the third-party contact details for you on the Main Client Details screen.

Client
Client records are the hub of your PPS database. PPS refers to these records as “Clients” rather than “Patients” because PPS is used across a variety of business and clinical disciplines, some of whom use the term “client” and others use “patient”. A client record can have either minimal details entered, such as first name and surname, or can be a comprehensive range of details including full address/contact details, alternative addresses, DOB, sex, “known as”, full profile details including “source of introduction”, occupation (plus a range of entries you can set up yourself). In addition you can associate a variety of third-parties to clients such as doctors, insurance companies, etc. The more comprehensive the details you store for each client, the greater the opportunities to use these details in your reports and mail-merge operation. For example, by recording the “source of introduction” for each client (such as yellow pages, local advert, recommendation, etc.) you can run almost any report in PPS to show a breakdown by “source of introduction”, for example “practice revenue” by “source of introduction” will show where you earn the most money from – thus where you should concentrate most on your advertising!

Code
See: Charge – Code; Diagnosis Code; Outcome Code

Complete
The term “Complete” is used in PPS for both Appointments and Consultations. You can select to Complete an Appointment – where is it marked in Purple, and you can then raise the charge, book another appointment, etc., and you can Complete a Consultation – where you can decide if the Treatment Episode is completed, or how many more consultations are required, you can raise the charge, produce a Discharge Letter etc. The term “Complete” is also used for Treatment Episodes that have an “End Date” entered – see: Completed Episodes.

Consultation
PPS uses the term “consultation” to define each time you see a client, whether or not it is an initial session, or a follow up one. PPS has a clinical notes system that allows you to record Consultation notes each time you see a client, and these are all part of a Treatment Episode. If you see a client once, and their treatment is completed in one consultation, then the Treatment Episode will only have one consultation. If, alternatively, you see a client six times before the treatment for the presenting problem is complete, then the “one” treatment episode will have “six” consultations. To access the clinical notes system in PPS, either select from the PPS Menu: Client – Consultation, or click Consultation on the PPS Task bar. You can select an appointment, or client record first if required to give immediate access to the consultation screen for that client.

Create
See: Add; Charge – Create

Details
This is a generic term used to describe the information stored in any particular part of PPS. For example Main Client Details is the information you enter to this screen. In addition, there are several “notes” type fields that allow you to enter further “free text” details against a record – these are also sometimes referred to as Details.

Diary
See: Appointments Diary

Invoice
An Invoice in PPS is an official bill that can be issued for payment by a client. In accounting terms an “Invoice” and “Receipt” is the same thing – a receipt is a printed copy of a “paid” invoice. The invoice has an invoice number and a date for tax purposes. PPS keeps a “ledger” of all invoices, and allows you to print an aged debtors report. An Invoice is formed from individual “line items” which in PPS are called Charges, so an invoice can only be raised after charges have been created. An invoice is “paid off” by recording a Payment and allocating the payment to the invoice. PPS is very flexible in terms of allowing either one charge, or an unlimited number of charges to appear on the invoice; also to allow either one payment to pay off one invoice, or one payment to pay off more than one invoice, or several payments to pay off one invoice. There are several ways to raise an invoice in PPS, some of these are fairly transparent in term of creating the charge, raising the invoice and recording the payment all in one step. Whichever method is used, PPS will always create proper Charge, Invoice and Payment records.

Known As
When recording your client details, you can select for each client the name that the client is known by to you. This can be useful if the name that you use to refer to the client is different from how you would address the client in letter (you can also specify the “salutation” to use when writing to the client). If you have entered the Known As details, then when the client’s details are displayed on most other screens in PPS such as the Clinical Notes and Accounts screens then the “known As” is displayed in parenthesis next to the proper client name thus: Jean Ainsworth (Jeanie).

List
List is the term used to describe information that either appears on the screen or on a report in rows and columns. The term List is also used in PPS as a list of items such as menu, or list of entries such as a look up table. See also: List style diary.

Look Up Tables
Look up Tables are used in PPS to control the entries that are allowed in certain fields. This means that you can restrict what values are input to just those that you want recorded. For example, when adding a new appointment, the “Appointment Type” look up table can contain entries such as “Initial Assessment”, “New Patient” or “Hydrotherapy”. This helps when running reports as you can select to break down the results of your report by the look up table entry thus minimising the number of different entries (especially slight variations of spellings!). --br-- Some Look Up tables will store additional default values. For example the “Appointment Type” table can optionally have a Charge Codes associated with each entry. When the selected entry is used for an appointment, the charge code will be automatically selected for you when you create the charge for the appointment. --br-- Look Up Tables are set up and maintained using the PPS Menu: Tools – Look Up Tables. --br-- You can control which of your PPS users has access to setting up and maintaining Look Up Tables as part of the PPS Access Control system. --br-- Also see the entry under the name of each Look Up Table e.g. Occupation

Notes
See: Client - Default Notes Entry

Options
PPS has a screen on the PPS Tools menu called Options. This screen can be used to set up a wide variety of system settings that affect the way that PPS works. You can make your changes to these areas and press the OK or Apply button to save your changes. The Options screen has four tabs along the top: General, Custom Client Fields, Set Up Client Contacts, and Clinical Notes. See the entries under each of these sections for more details, for example Options – General.

Order
This term applies to the Order in which information is listed on the screen. Information in PPS is often listed in a “Grid” with rows and columns; you can often click on the column headings to change the order in which the information is displayed. There is also a Client Browse screen that includes an “order” selection to allow the client details to be displayed in a variety of orders such as Surname, etc.

Payment
A Payment in PPS is recorded when money is received from clients or third-parties. A payment must be allocated to an invoice – either immediately or in the future. If a payment is received in advance (a pre-payment) for consultations or treatment that has not yet been carried out, then the payment can be allocated to the invoice in the future when the invoice is raised. Payments are either recorded using a specific PPS screen to “record a payment”, or are automatically recorded when an invoice or charge is raised and “marked as paid”. If payments are received from third-parties, then these are recorded on the third-parties own accounts screen where the invoices to the third party will appear. If payments are received from clients, the these are recorded on the client’s own accounts screen.

PPS
PPS is the acronym for “Private Practice Software”.

Practitioner
A practitioner in PPS is a system user. To add a practitioner to PPS, you need to add a new system user, and indicate that they are a practitioner as part of their user details. When a user is a practitioner, they appear on the list of practitioners to select to allocate to most PPS records. PPS allocates a practitioner to most types of records so that you can see which practitioner is responsible for that record, also you can break down most report in PPS by practitioner.

Print
You can print various types of information in PPS including client details, clinical notes, Invoices, letters, and a wide variety of reports. All printing in PPS is done using your standard Windows printer driver for your selected printer. Many screens in PPS have a <Print> button that is used to print details for that part of the system. See also: Reports – Report Output.

Receipt
See: Invoice; Accounts - Printing

Search
You can search for various records in PPS: Clients, Appointments, Third-Party contacts etc. Some screens include a <Search> button on the toolbar. The main PPS Client Search screen includes options to search on a variety of fields: for example Surname. This screen can be accessed from the Search Button on any of the client screens (main details, log, browse) or by clicking “Search” on the PPS Task Bar. The Search screen allows you to enter all or part of a value into a selected field, then when you press Enter a list of results that match what you have typed in is displayed. The most common information to search on is Surname. In the Surname field on the search screen, it is possible to enter all or part of the surname followed by a space, then all or part of the client’s First Name. This way you can narrow down your search results – useful with popular surnames. For example, you can search for Joe Smith simply by entering SMI J in the Surname field and pressing enter. All clients whose surname starts with SMI and whose First Name starts with J will be listed. --br-- You can search for existing Client Appointments or Free Appointment Slots using the <Search> button on the Appointments Diary – see: Appointments Diary – Search for more details.

Select
A term used when you choose something on the screen. Some PPS screens have a <Select> button, this normally means that you pick an option, or entry in a list, then click the <Select> button. This will “select” your chosen entry and proceed to the next screen, or return to the previous screen with your chosen entry selected.

Set Up
See: Medical History – Setting Up; PPS – Setting Up; Custom Form – Maintenance; Users – Setting Up; Letterhead – Set Up