Seeing reception payments on the patient's file
How reception till payments reach a patient's file in the Healthcare pack's fourth wave, how they link, and what to check when one seems missing.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Healthcare businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.
A patient phones: "I paid for my last two visits at reception, but your statement says I owe you." The receptionist opens the patient's file, and before the Healthcare pack's fourth wave, the file could show the appointments but not the money taken at the till for them. The answer lived somewhere else, in the till's sessions and receipts, and finding it meant searching by date and amount.
Linking till sales to the patient's file closes that gap. This article explains where till payments live, how the appointment workflow records them, what the fourth wave adds to the patient's timeline, and how to check when a payment seems to have vanished.
Where till sales live
The till comes with the Point of Sale add-on, under Commerce & POS. Every till sale that reaches the server posts a balanced journal in the same step, with the payment to its own account by method, revenue, output VAT and, for anything taken from stock, cost of sales. The receipt is a PDF made by the server from the posted sale, showing every payment, VAT by rate and the practice's tax number, and it can be printed, downloaded or e-mailed to the patient.
So a till payment is always fully recorded as a sale, in the ledger and on the receipt. What the sale on its own does not carry is the patient's story: which file and which visit it belongs to.
The appointment step that records a till payment
The Healthcare pack calls customers Patients and keeps two kinds of record, a Patient file and an Appointment. The appointment workflow sends a booking confirmation, records attendance, and then either invoices the visit or records that it was paid at the till.
That last step is the bridge. When reception marks a visit as paid at the till, the appointment itself carries the fact of payment, so anyone opening the appointment later can see the visit was settled at the desk rather than billed to an account.
A good discipline at the desk: complete the appointment step at the moment the patient pays, not at the end of the day from memory. A visit marked "paid at the till" with no matching till sale is a question; a till sale with no visit marked paid is another.
Till sales on the patient's timeline
The Industry CRM's fourth wave links till sales to a customer's timeline. In the Healthcare pack, that means a payment rung up at reception appears on the patient's timeline, beside their appointments.
The same wave brings two other changes worth knowing: low stock can turn into a reorder task, which helps a dispensing practice, and dashboards are read from the ledger. The pack's home-page counts already come from records, tasks or the ledger, none typed in by hand, so what the front desk sees reflects what was actually recorded.
What front-desk staff see on the file
With the link in place, a receptionist answering that phone call opens the patient's file and sees, in one place:
- The patient's appointments, with attendance recorded.
- Which visits were marked as paid at the till.
- The till sales linked to the patient, on their timeline.
The pack is for the front desk only. It keeps no clinical notes, diagnoses, test results or prescriptions, so the file shows administration and money, not care.
Payments on account are a separate stream. When a visit is invoiced instead, the patient's payments are recorded against the invoice in receivables, where a part payment leaves the invoice part-paid. If the patient's question is about an invoiced visit, the answer is on their account and statement, not in the till.
Checks when a payment seems to be missing
When a patient says they paid and the file does not show it, work through the possibilities in order:
- Was it a till payment or an account payment? Check whether the visit was invoiced. If it was, look at receipts on the patient's account rather than the till.
- Was the appointment step completed? A visit never marked as paid at the till may still have a till sale behind it.
- Is there a receipt? Ask the patient for the receipt number from their printed or e-mailed receipt. Receipt numbers are issued by the server, so a genuine one can be found.
- Was the till offline? If the connection dropped, till sales are kept in the browser and sent again when it returns, and a resent sale is never recorded twice. A sale still waiting to be sent will appear once the till reconnects.
- Was it rung up under another family member? Parents often pay for children at the same visit.
- Was it refunded or voided? Refunds and voids need a supervisor or manager, and a refund is its own document with a reason, so the supervisor on duty that day is the person to ask.
A worked example in words: a patient insists he paid for two visits. The receptionist opens his file: the first visit shows paid at the till, with the sale on his timeline. The second was marked paid, but no sale is linked. She asks for his receipt and finds the sale rung up under his daughter's name the same morning. She explains it to him, and the practice manager decides how to set the record straight so his file tells the full story next time.
For the attendance step itself, see recording appointment attendance, and for what a patient's receipt should show, giving patients a proper receipt at reception. In South Africa, the Consumer Protection Act's section 26 on sales records sets out the written record a supplier must give a consumer for every transaction and what it must contain, which is why the receipt is the first thing to ask for.
A payment that is on the patient's file is a question answered in seconds rather than an afternoon. Complete the appointment step when the patient pays, give every patient a receipt, and use the file as the first place to look.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
