Solutions / Medical and dental practices / Posting a remittance that does not balance to the ledger

Posting a remittance that does not balance to the ledger

The amount in the bank rarely equals the amount on the file. A PLB segment carries adjustments belonging to the provider rather than to any one claim, so a WO recovery for something paid months ago sits inside the payment for today, and an FB forward balance pushes what could not be recouped into the next file. Tying the deposit back to the remittance runs on the reassociation trace number, which the bank passes through in the CCD+ addenda only when somebody has asked it to do that.


Context / medical and dental practices Why this one is worth doing here

Electronic eligibility answers whether a patient is covered, and then somebody opens the payer portal anyway to find out what is actually payable.

There is a mandated electronic standard for eligibility, and it works. It confirms that a plan is active. What it routinely omits is the detail the front desk actually needs: frequency limitations, waiting periods, alternate benefit provisions and remaining annual maximum. That gap is the origin of most manual verification in this sector.

Systems this usually touches

  • Open Dental
  • athenahealth
  • QuickBooks Online

When this is the wrong thing to build

Pick something else if most payers reimburse by virtual card, since a card number faxed over has no remittance file behind it to reconcile against, or if a billing company already posts every payment and the practice never touches the file it worked from.

The constraint that shapes it

A practice is a covered entity, and any vendor that creates, receives, maintains or transmits protected health information on its behalf is a business associate, which requires a written agreement in place before any disclosure. More on how this sector works.

The same shape elsewhere / Reconciliation 12 sectors run it

Two sources of truth. One queue of the rows that do not line up. Read what this shape is, or start from one of these.

Real estate
Rebuilding an annual operating expense reconciliation from the lease
Real estate
Reconciling a broker trust account three ways every month
Real estate
Matching a closed transaction back to the lead that produced it
Real estate
Collapsing two overlapping MLS feeds into one property list
Law firms
Widening a conflicts search past exact spelling
Law firms
Rebuilding a billable day from the trail the systems already keep
What people ask about this 5 of them
  • What does a PLB segment mean on an 835 remittance?
  • Why does the deposit not match the total on the remittance file?
  • How do I find which claim a payer took money back from?
  • Why did the payer pay by virtual card instead of electronic funds transfer?
  • What is a reassociation trace number and where does it come from?

Back to medical and dental practices, or see how this is priced and scoped.