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Expenditure Management
Expenditure Management is an optional PPS Module. With it you can record the expenses of your business, from sundries, to gas and electric bills - even staff wages. Furthermore from the information that you input into the system, you can run reports based on the criteria and details of your expenses.
Adding an Expense to the System
- To access expenditure management, you will need to navigate to your PPS Menu > Accounts > Expenditure Management.

- Initially you will have a blank data sheet, so you will need to click on the New button to bring up the ‘Add New Expenditure Record’ screen.

c. Firstly you will need to create the supplier. Click on the Add button next to ‘Supplier’.

d. The list will be empty if this is the first time selecting a supplier. Click on the Add button to bring up the following screen.

e. In this screen you will need to add in the various details of the supplier. The term supplier can be used loosely as the ‘Supplier Name’ field can be used for anything, from a supplier of stationary, to your own companies name if you are recording wages from a cleaner.
Details in here are not mandatory, but it is important to fill in the Supplier name, Unique ID and Expense Type. Once done click on Save. This ‘Supplier’ will now be added to the list.

f. Now you will have to fill in the following fields. Inputting data into these fields is not mandatory, but the more details you record, the more options you will have for your accounts along with further ability to define your various reports via breakdown and criteria options.

g. Once you have a few expense items recorded, from the main screen, you can filter on Supplier, Practioner and Expense types, along with altering some of the columns by clicking on their grey border.
Using the Practice Expenditure Report
- The Expenditure report can be accessed from the PPS Menu > Reports > Reports and Mail Merge > Accounts tab > Practice Expenditure Report > Open.

- The report allows you to report on all the information you have entered into the system, from the above option to include either or both of the purchases paid or not paid, to the options below to define what you wish to include in the report print out itself.

- You can further define the report via the breakdowns and criteria tabs of the report as well.

- Once done, click on Finish and preview/print the report you have created.
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. Add Look this up under the type of new record you want to add – e.g. Client - Add or Appointment - Add Breakdown This is a term used on all PPS Reports. When you run a report, you can select to breakdown the results into groups or categories. Most PPS reports allow you to breakdown to two levels. The breakdown category will have it’s own heading and sub-totals on the report. For example, if you select to breakdown your report by Practitioner, then each practitioner will have their own heading on the report, with the report results shown for that practitioner underneath the heading. At the end of the report results for that Practitioner, there will be a sub-total line showing totals for that Practitioner. Typically an accounts/revenue report could be broken down by Month then Practitioner. This means that each Month will have its own section on the report (and its own sub-total line) and then within each month, the report will show one section per practitioner. Using a breakdown on most reports is optional. Columns See: Appointments Diary - Columns Create See: Add; Charge – Create Criteria See: Report Wizard - Criteria Data Data is a general term that refers to all your records. In computer terms, data is any piece of information that you can change, so this includes your normal records (client records, billing, appointments, etc.) and other information such as letter layouts, invoice templates and so on. PPS allows you to “back up” your data, which means to make a second copy of all your data. See: Back Up; Database for more details. 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. Expenditure See: Practice Expenditure report; PPS Expense Expenses See: Practice Expenditure report; PPS Expense Grid See: Client – Browse Important You can flag information as “important” while recording your clinical notes. For more details see: Consultation – Important information. Include This is a term used in the PPS Reports Wizard – on step 3 of the selections for your report. On most reports you can select to “include” a selection of details on the printed report. You can un-tick any items that you do not want to include. The “Include” options only apply when the report is printed or previewed – if you are exporting the report to a file or mail merge, then the “include” options do not apply. 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. Mandatory Mandatory is the term used in PPS Custom Forms when a question included on the form must be answered. If you are setting up your own forms, you can decide if each question is mandatory or not. 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”. 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. 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. Save PPS Uses a <Save> button on many screens. This will save the updates that you have made to this screen and store them permanently in your database. One some screens the <Save> button will also close the screen. Time See: Activities – Time; Appointments – Time
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