Recurring Charges and Rate Changes

Recurring Charges account for the vast majority of revenue, and they are invoiced to your residents automatically on a monthly basis according to your financial agreements.

When there is a planned service change or you are preparing for a resident move-out, ALIS provides an efficient way to add rate changes and end services before the affected invoices are generated.

• This guide refers to the Impact Review settings, which are highly recommended to help your whole team invoice new charges and changes to recurring charges. Read this article to learn more about Impact Review: Impact Review.
• Recurring charges are added to the resident profile by selecting from a list of Billing Items that are configured in Billing Settings. It is important to be familiar with the Billing Items available at your community, and to have a clear policy for which items are allocated to which residents. These are likely Rent and Care charges, or your organization might bill for these two services as one charge "all-inclusive". Your organization may also bill for specific services 'a la carte'.
• Look to this article for more information about your Billing Settings, including the setup of Billing Items: Billing Settings.

Recurring Charges section on the Resident Profile

Familiarize yourself with this section by noticing the following details:

• Scroll toward the bottom of the page to find the Recurring Charges section in the Billing area. Click the blue bar to expand the section and review the following details:
  • This section displays a Current Care Level and Fee associated with their most recent Evaluation and Service Plan completed in ALIS. The Care Level may have no associated fees, or you might use this value to determine the resident's monthly care charge.
  • Estimated Next Period Fees shows what you can expect to be billed in the next upcoming billing period based on the Active & Future charges below. 
  • If the Billing status shows "Active", you can expect an invoice to run on the Next Recurring Date. You can click the Pause button if you do not want the next invoice to generate, and you can click Change to edit the Next Recurring Date for this resident.

Adding Recurring Charges

Always verify that your resident Default Payer is set up properly before adding recurring charges to their profile. The payer name attached to the recurring charge will be the person to whom invoices are addressed, and these are the only people who can submit ACH payments to pay the invoices!

This article helps describe all related preparations for billing when you have a resident move in: Billing for Resident Move-Ins.

Follow these steps to add Recurring Charges:

1. In the Active & Future tab, start by clicking +Add Recurring Charge to add their monthly charges.
2. This opens a pane on the right side of your screen where you can select the appropriate Payer Type, Payer (should most likely be the Default Payer), and Billing Item. 
   • Once you have selected the Billing Item, you can add a description to display on invoices, and update the Service Start date. The Price may be automatically filled in but it is editable if you need to change it. Click Submit to save.
3. Next you might see an Impact Review pop-up requiring how you want to allocate the charges to invoices.
   • You can use this to create your Move-In Invoice! Set the "Action" column to Add Charge, and set the "To" menu to Create New Invoice.
   • If you do not need to create the invoice yet, but want the charges to display on the next automatically-generated invoice, set the "To" menu to Future Invoice Charges.
   • For more information about Impact Review settings, read this article: Impact Review.
4. Add any other charges to recurring billing. In the Impact Review, you can set the "To" menu to the invoice you initially created with the first charge, or to Future Invoice Charges.
5. If you do not use Impact Review (there will be no pop-up after you add the charges), you may need to create invoices manually. This article goes more in-depth how to manually create Invoices: Billing for Resident Move-Ins.

If you have made a mistake on any of the items in Recurring Charges, you can edit or delete them when you click the Options button. Once invoices have been created, editing the charges will historically impact reports that detail recurring charges within the charge dates. Editing charges will not impact historically-generated invoices.

• • If you are changing the rate on any of these items, use the option to Add Rate Change described in the next section!

Rate Changes

When the price of a charge is the only detail that changes, you can schedule a rate change, which will automate the process of allocating charges to invoices generated during the change date and invoices going forward.

This will also help if you need to add a rate change that took place in the past. Based on the date of the rate change, Impact Review will automate adding credits to previous invoices for the old version of the charge, and apply the updated version of the charge.

Bulk Rate Changes

You can also update rates in bulk for your residents. This allows you to efficiently schedule changes to the pricing of specific charges for multiple residents.

It is important to note when you complete the rate changes in bulk, there is no impact review, so any changes that are meant to affect invoices that have already generated will need to be done individually.

Start in the Bulk Recurring Charges page. To get there, click the Billing menu > Bulk Imports > Bulk Recurring.

Click Add Rate Change. In the pop-up, select the appropriate Billing Item and the group of residents who will be impacted by the rate change. 

• If you leave the Resident filter set to 'All', you can remove individual residents who might be exempt in the next step.
• The the next step will only include residents who currently have the selected Billing Item as a Recurring Charge on their profile.

You can add an optional Rate Change Note, which will appear in the audit of the Bulk Recurring Charges page. Click Add Rate Change to go to the next step.

On the Add Rate Change page, you can quickly update all impacted residents to have the same new rate if you use the Bulk Edit button.

Otherwise, scroll to the right to view the information about the charge for each person, and update the price. You can also choose different dates for the rate changes if needed.

Once you click Submit, ALIS will display a pop-up confirmation. Back on the Bulk Recurring Charges page, you can view audits of any bulk creation of recurring charges or rate changes.

Separately, you can also use the Edit Recurring Charges button to edit them historically. This will not impact invoices that have already been generated. If you make any changes dated in the past, these will be reflected on the Recurring Charges report. Updates to specific invoices will always need to be done individually.

End Service

In addition to Rate Changes, it is important to be aware of how you can end services for residents. ALIS offers a convenient way to schedule these ahead of time if you have enough notice, which removes the need to update invoices after they have already generated.

Additionally, the Impact Review feature will help you calculate any necessary credits to existing invoices, so even if no more invoices will run, you should click End Service for all recurring charges in order to close out a resident's billing.

Even if you do not use the Impact Review feature, it is important to click End Service for the charges to document the specific date they should end for all reports. This is also one way to keep any future invoices from generating!

Related Articles:

Impact Review

Monthly Invoicing with ALIS

Billing Settings