Two key ways your consolidated Invoicing process isn’t working
Third party administrators (TPAs) know that brokers often come up with “creative” healthcare and benefit plan designs that require complex management on the part of the TPA. At a point, it can become maddening to manage between bundles, tiers, and contracts and multiplied by the number of your broker clients.
Varying benefit plan designs put added pressure on your team to meet the complex reporting and invoicing demands of each client. In fact, because the majority of TPAs run their Consolidated Invoicing processes manually, each new client that you bring on introduces an additional opportunity for risk.
Certainly not to the fault of the team, you likely can also think of times there have been data integrity errors, late nights of manual data entry, or instances where you or the team has exasperatedly said “there’s got to be a better way.”
Below, we go into the different ways your existing consolidated invoicing process isn’t working and a simple automated solution that cuts a week manual process into an hour – freeing your team up to focus on more important matters.
Manual Consolidated Invoicing Adds Extraordinary (and Unnecessary) Stress to Your Team
Repetitive work is part of the workplace for almost all office workers and data entry is one of the most common repetitive work tasks and represents tasks ripe for automation. In fact, studies suggest a majority of US workers believe that at least part of their job could be automated.
The herculean effort of data matching and extraction across multiple systems puts significant pressure on your team. Pair this with the pressure to complete consolidated invoicing quickly within a five day window every month, and our guess is that your team is downright stressed. HR leaders are starting to link higher stress to reduced business outcomes, a topic more recently brought to the forefront due to the global Coronavirus pandemic.
The pressure of 100% accuracy coupled with the time pressure to complete on time contributes to burnout and retention problems. Because of the complex contracts you likely manage, the time to train new employees is lengthy and puts your business at significant risk if your experts leave. Manual consolidated invoicing relies on your team’s expertise of extracting and matching data from multiple systems.
During the invoicing week, all efforts are focused on getting the invoices completed, putting additional pressure on your business as the team is too occupied to complete other valuable work or find ways to innovate.
Because you invoice manually, your TPA is missing opportunity to grow
Two common ways for your TPA to grow is through invoicing more frequently or adding more clients, but if your firm is maxed out, its likely you’re facing scaling issues using your existing manual process.
Invoicing more frequently helps TPAs follow up and receive on time payment, but it’s difficult to manage growth when 25% of your team’s time is consumed by the consolidated invoicing week (on average, our customers report spending 1 week per month on invoicing).
According to a recent study by Deloitte, as workers are freed up from mundane and automatable work, “their work can be redefined and focused on creating new value.”
Firms who’ve successfully automated consolidated invoicing with TPA Stream have reported they’re able to invoice more frequently. As a result, they’ve seen increased on time payment, better working relationships with their clients, and have minimized their accounts receivable thereby freeing up capital to invest in further business growth!
The second common way to grow is by billing for additional features or invoice features. The common solution to solve for this is to add more staff but you’re not driving your variable staff hours costs down. Instead you’re contributing to your costs with additional hires. You’d have to make significantly more revenue on each added feature, which is often not possible. The only way to do this on scale is to find an automated solution.
What’s a business owner to do?
There’s a simple solution that solves for your team’s stress and your company’s scaling challenges: TPA Stream. TPA Stream’s Consolidated Invoicing solution securely completes the manual week-long data matching and entry task of your team in just one hour. This frees your team up to focus on more important matters like driving innovation and revenue for your business. TPA Stream instantly creates invoices that meet the most complex of broker requirements instantly.
Our partners have told us they’re able to reduce errors exponentially, resulting in better service for their clients, too.
Let us learn about your needs and show you how we can help with a demo.