Billing & accounting

Money comes into a clinic through several places: cash in the drawer, bank transfers, e-wallets. Money going out is scattered too, and what patients have prepaid or still owe often lives only in a few staff members' memories. When income and expenses are kept on paper or in spreadsheets, questions like "how much did we really earn this month, who still owes us, why is the drawer off" wait until someone sits down to add everything up at month end.

The Accounting module brings that cash flow into one place, for accountants, cashiers, managers and clinic owners. The dashboard shows the month's revenue, expenses, profit and total receivables at a glance.

For a clinic's customers, collecting starts on the Payment tab of the customer record. Three buttons cover three situations: add a deposit when the customer prepays without a specific service yet, pay when collecting for a particular service, and installment when collecting a due period. Collecting in several parts creates one line each time, and the software adds them up and deducts them from the order's balance, and each line can be printed as a slip at the desk.

The installment schedule is set when the order is created, so at collection time you just tick the due period and the amount fills in. For visits in the electronic medical record, the Payments screen gives the cashier four figures per row: total fee, insurance share, patient share and amount paid, so the person at the desk can read out what the patient still owes.

Prepaid money is where books go wrong most easily, because it is in the fund but the service has not been done. The software separates it: a deposit is tied to a service or appointment and has a return date, while a custody deposit is tied to the customer to be drawn down across several services. When taking a deposit, staff pick the deposit type and must enter a note so it can be explained later.

A deposit has only two exits: it becomes service payment, or it is returned through a deposit refund slip. Until then, the deposits held are money the clinic owes the customer, not revenue. If the customer already used the service and then stops, a service refund slip records a revenue deduction for the period, unlike a deposit refund because that money was once counted as revenue.

For the same customer payment, the payment slip is the view from the order side and the receipt is the view from the document side, with its own code that reveals the branch and period. Separating service money from deposit money for a report is a single filter by payment type. Each slip has a payment date, when it was recorded on the order, and a collection date, when the money actually reached the fund; when reconciling, the date that must match is the collection date.

The cash fund register defines each place money is held, such as the front desk drawer or a bank account, each with an opening balance and a matching payment method so receipts flow into the right fund automatically. At the end of a shift the cashier enters the counted amount, the software calculates the difference against the system figure, and keeps the reconciliation with an explanation. A positive or negative difference points to where to look: a collection with no receipt, or an expense or bank deposit with no fund transaction.

When a customer needs an invoice for a paid amount, for example a company paying for an employee, the electronic invoice is issued straight from the order and receipt. Cluvix Health connects to the e-invoice providers named in the documentation, Viettel, MISA and VNPT, using the invoice account the clinic already has, so there is no exporting data and retyping it into a separate invoicing tool. The connection can be set brand-wide or per branch.

The invoice list filters by issuing status and shows three figures for each invoice: amount before tax, tax amount and total. These same three figures feed the output VAT report. An invoice is best issued once the payment has been recorded, so the invoice always matches the receipt and needs no adjustment later.

Invoices received from suppliers, such as supplies or outsourced services, are kept in the incoming invoices list with supplier, tax code, invoice number, series, invoice date, amount before tax and tax rate. The declaration period field decides which report an invoice lands in: an invoice dated at month end but received the following month can still be declared in the later period, as long as you enter the right period.

The VAT report pre-computes three figures for each period: output VAT from issued e-invoices, input VAT from incoming invoices, and VAT payable as the difference between the two. The two detail listings below show each invoice, so when a total looks odd you open the listing and see which invoice caused it.

The report list groups more than forty reports, each with a one-line description under its name. Customer revenue can be sliced by several dimensions such as day, branch, customer source, service group or service, so you can see which channel brings real revenue and not just interest.

For receivables there are reports for customers who owe, orders with balances, debt by treatment, by treatment session, by installment and by product. The by-customer report is a follow-up call list, while the installment report tracks periods not yet settled. Consulting revenue and consulting commission can be used to work out pay and bonuses, but the two are recognized at different moments so they can differ.

For accountants, the valuable part is that posting does not have to be done by hand for every document. You define posting rules once, for example a receipt debits 111 and credits 511, and the receipts that arise daily flow into the ledger by that rule. A dry-run button shows the entries before running for real, and transactions that do not match a rule wait in an exception queue for manual handling.

At period end, locking the accounting period closes that month so nobody adds or edits documents in it, which keeps a report printed today identical to one reprinted next month. A clinic currently keeping books in MISA has a conversion screen: load account balances and detailed receivables and payables from a file, preview before importing, then run a parallel comparison of the two systems for the first few periods.