4 Reasons Your Lab Should Use Automated Bank Reconciliation

In a recent blog post titled “How the Most Successful Laboratories in the Country Continue to Thrive in the Midst of an Increasingly Complex Reimbursement Environment,” XiFin Vice President of Sales, Steve Neilson discussed the importance of real-time visibility and business intelligence for laboratories. Laboratory revenue cycle management (RCM) solutions that are interoperable and are designed to integrate or interface with upstream and downstream applications make bank reconciliation easier. In this blog post, we detail the benefits and break down the processes involved in bank reconciliation.

Why Automated Bank Reconciliation?

Here are four benefits of automating your bank reconciliation process:

• Significantly reduce manual process’s when reconciling the daily/monthly bank transactions with deposit batches created in the XiFin RPM system.
• Quickly identify payor remittances in your bank, but not in your RPM.
• Quickly identify payments in your RCM, but not in the bank. This means that the remittance was received but the electronic fund transfer has not appeared.
• Facilitate daily bank fund confirmation and expedited payment posting.

How it Works

In this next section, we break down the cash reconciliation cycle and describe how the process works within XiFin RPM.

First, XiFin RPM’s bank reconciliation automation requests the BAI2 data file from the customer’s bank. The BAI2 data files represent all the transactions that have occurred in the customer’s bank account(s).

Secondly, EFT/ACH’s and other types of deposits are received in the bank, and the deposits are created in XiFin RPM either manually or automatically.

The third phase of the process is to reconcile the files received in XIFN from the bank, reflect the bank transactions, and compare them to the deposits created in XiFin RPM. XiFin RPM will automatically match the deposit transactions in the BAI file to the XiFin deposits. The results are published in two of the XiFin RPM Business Intelligence reports 1) Unreconciled Deposits and 2) Reconciled Deposits. The client will now have the ability to research the unreconciled items and determine the next action.

How it Works

XiFin RPM is intelligently automated, but also facilitates additional due diligence for employees. As you can see from the workflow diagram below, employees still have an important role to play to ensure that the processes on the client side are correctly executed.

Want to know more about automated bank reconciliation and intelligent RCM automation?