A pre-payment policy for your clinic means that a patient will need to leave a card on file, pay a deposit, or pay the full amount when they book in. This can be customized to apply to all appointments, or for only first-time appointments. When a payment is made for an appointment as part of a pre-payment policy, it is added as a “pending” payment and the same amount is added as a credit on the patient’s account.
If you only require a card on file, the card will not be charged unless you choose to use it for a Late Cancellation/No-Show fee or to sell a Gift Card or Membership ahead of the appointment.
We hear all the time from our community how helpful these policies are for preventing no-shows.
Setting up a pre-payment policy
To setup a pre-payment policy for your clinic, first navigate to the Online Booking section in your clinic Settings. Scroll down to the Payment Policy section to change the pre-payment policy at the clinic. This can be changed by any full-access user at the clinic.
To make the first-visit policy different for patients, you can change the “First Visit Payment Policy” setting directly below the Payment Policy setting to be different.
Viewing Pre-payments
To view a pre-payment on an account, navigate to the profile in Jane and select the Billing Tab. From there, select the “Payments” tab to see all of the patient’s payments. Any payments marked as “pending” are pre-payments, and have not yet been applied to an invoice.
By clicking the View button, you’ll be able to remove this payment’s association with the booked appointment, or view it in the schedule.
Note: Removing pre-paid appointments cannot be undone. It is not possible to set up prepaid appointments on the administrative side.
When pre-payments are enabled, there are a few different types of values that you should become familiar with when you’re viewing a payment that was pre-paid: total applied, balance remaining and available to apply.
- Total Applied = Amount applied to invoice
- Balance Remaining = Total Credit (Intended Credit + Available Credit)
- Available to Apply = Available Credit (appears when there is available credit)
Note: If the No-show button is selected the pending amount is removed and resides in credit. If you would like to use that payment to apply it towards the no-show, you can do so using the receive payment button.