Activities Report

Accounts
The PPS Accounts system includes facilities for you to bill your clients, or third parties, record payments received, and manage all invoices that are overdue for payment. In addition, PPS also offers an additional module called PPS Expense that can be used to record details of practice expenditure. The Accounts system in PPS is not designed to be a full accounts system with ledgers, balance sheets, etc. but it can be used to supply revenue and expenditure information directly to another accounts system by way of exporting the information through reports. PPS Accounts billing is structured into three areas: Charges, Invoices and Payments. Firstly Charges must be created, then an invoice produced, then a payment recorded. A Charge, or charges simply become “line items” on an invoice, and a payment recorded is “allocated” to the invoice. PPS is flexible enough to accommodate all requirements for practice billing including third-party billing, split billing (between client and third party), recording several payments against one invoice, or recording one payment against several invoices. There are various points throughout PPS that enable charges to be quickly created and “paid off” in one step. This single step still produces the correct Charge, Invoice and Payment records.

Activities
Activities in PPS are a way of keeping a record of contacts, telephone calls, letters, etc. that you have with your Clients or Third-Party contacts. Activities can all have a specific PPS User, and Practitioner assigned to them, and can be scheduled for completion in the future or immediately. Activities appear in the Client Log for each client, as well as on the Activities List and the Task List. A System of colours is used to denote activities that are: Due – Green; Not yet due – Orange; Completed – Purple and Overdue (task list only) – Red. See Also: Activities – Activity Types

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!

Clinical Notes
The Clinical Notes facility in PPS is available in the “Professional” version of PPS. This includes screens to record your Clinical Notes, manage Treatment Episodes, complete specific forms (Custom Forms) including body charts and your own questionnaires, etc. All Clinical Notes are structured into the framework of Treatment Episodes. Although some of you may be used to slightly different terminology, PPS uses “Treatment Episode” to define a specific course of treatment for a specific condition, and “Consultation” as the individual treatment sessions/consultations. Therefore each time you see a client – whether or not it is an initial consultation/assessment or a follow up treatment – this is known as a “Consultation”. You can have more than one current Treatment Episode per client if required. When you select to record clinical notes, PPS checks to see if there are any current (not completed) Treatment Episodes for the client. If there is more than one, you can choose which one to record your consultation notes for. Otherwise a new Treatment Episode will be started, and this consultation will be consultation number one for the new Treatment Episode. When you complete the consultation, you can enter set up the full details of the Treatment Episode including the name, number of consultations required, diagnosis details etc. See: Treatment Episode for more details. For more detailed information about recording clinical notes and consultations, see: various entries under Consultation and Custom Forms.

Favourites
PPS offers a wide variety of reports for which you can select a broad range of selections, criteria and breakdown options. You have the option of adding any report, including your selections, criteria and breakdown options to a list of Favourites. To access your favourite reports, these are displayed alongside all other PPS reports and are accessed from the PPS Menu: Reports – PPS Reports & Mail Merge. This screen has a “favourites” section in the bottom right corner. To add a report to your favourites list, simply select any report from any section, and select the <Open> button for that section. The PPS Report Wizard screen appears allowing you to make your selections for the report – this screen has an <Add to Favourites> button (if you open one of your current favourite reports, the button prompt is <Update Favourites>). When you add a report to your favourites, you can add a Title and Description that will appear on the main PPS Reports menu screen. All your selections for the report are saved so that each time you run the report you do not have to make all your selections again.

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.

Mail Merge
A mail merge is when you want to send a standard letter to several of, or all your clients in one go. You can produce a Mail Merge in PPS using PPS Reports. Most PPS reports have Mail Merge as one of the output options. As an example, you can use the Client List Report to produce a mail merge. This means that instead of printing your list of clients, the same list is used as the names/addresses list to merge with a standard letter to send to each client included on the report. This gives you great flexibility for producing mail merges, as it means that you can manipulate the selections and criteria for your report first to produce a very precise list of clients to be included in the mail merge. For example, you can select to write to clients you have recorded as having a certain pre-existing condition such as diabetes, or all Female clients within a certain age range and so on, giving you great opportunities to send fairly specific targeted mailings to chosen groups of your clients. You can also use the mail merge feature to send bulk e-mails to your clients using the same mail merge options. To produce a mail merge, select from the PPS Menu: Reports – PPS Reports & Mail Merge, then select a report to run that will give you the results you need for your mail merge, for example Client List report. Use the report wizard to make any specific selections for your report, for example “clients who you last saw more than six months ago” can be selected using “Last occurrence” on step 1, and a date range of “From” date=blank and “To” date = the date as of six months ago. When you have finished your selections, click <Finish>, then on the Report Output screen click <Mail Merge>. Then on the Mail Merge output screen you have the option to either select Letters & E-Mail where you can use the PPS Letter editor to send a standard PPS letter to your clients included in the report, or select to produce a File which you can use with another mail merge program such as Microsoft Word. Alternatively, you can use Labels to prepare a mailing label for each client in your list also.

Notes
See: Client - Default Notes Entry

Open
Some screens in PPS have an “Open” button on the toolbar, this is very similar to the Modify button as it will “open” the selected record for “modification”.

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.

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.

Preview
See: Reports – Report Output

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.

Report Output
See: Reports – Report Output

Report Wizard
The PPS Report Wizard guides you through your selections for all PPS reports. The report wizard screen can be accessed from any of the reports available on the PPS reports selection screen – from the PPS Menu: Reports – PPS Reports & Mail Merge. Select any report from any section and click <Open> - this shows the Report Wizard screen. The screen has five “tabs” along the top – these are the “five steps” of selections that you can make. Not all reports show all five steps, when one of the steps is not applicable it will be low-lighted – the screen will show step n of 4 instead n of 5. The five steps are: Select, Date range, Include, Breakdown, and Criteria – see: entries in this reference guide for each of these selections for more details, for example: Report Wizard – Date Range. When you have finished your selections in the report wizard, you can use the <Finish> button to proceed to the report output screen, or use the <Add to Favourites> button to add this report, including all your report wizard selections to your Favourites list.

Reports
PPS includes many different reports that you can run that present information accumulated from various parts of the system. There are two main reports options: Summaries and Statistics, and PPS Reports and Mail Merge. In addition to these two main options, there is a variety of other print-outs that you can produce from PPS that are not included in the category of reports. These include: Printing the Diary, Client Details, Medical History and Clinical Notes. You can access the PPS reports options from the PPS Menu: Reports. For more details about the Statistics & Summaries type reports, see: Statistics & Summaries. When you select the PPS Reports & Mail Merge option, a reports selection screen appears – this screen is divided into the various categories of reports that you can run. Most reports (certainly client-based reports) can also be used for mail merge purposes. Select a report from any of the categories and use either the Run option (see: Reports – Run) or the Open option (see: reports – Open). When you select Open, you will be guided through the Report Wizard (see: Report Wizard) to allow you to make your specific selections for the report before choosing a report output option (see: Reports – Report Output). See also: various entries in this reference guide under Reports for further details. For details of individual reports, see: the entry under the report name, for example Charges Report or Aged Debtors Report.

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.