FAQ 005: Is ClinicOffice an Accountancy program?

[Mat Larkin]

Although ClinicOffice does handle Patient Accounts (i.e. patient/insurance company invoicing, payments,
credit notes, refunds), it is not designed to be a full accountancy program for your clinic.

Many of our customers use software like SAGE, QuickBooks or Xero alongside ClinicOffice for their accountancy needs.

For example, you can use ClinicOffice to handle the billing side of your business (i.e. raising invoices, accepting payments etc.) and then at the end of each day (or week, or month) you can simply print off a detailed Invoice/Payment report which show how much the business has billed, and how much it has received. These figures can then be entered as a 'one line' entry into the accountancy program of your choice.

Many customers have found this works really well for them. Basically, it allows ClinicOffice to do what it does best (i.e. Patient and Clinic management) while your Accountancy software is best equipped to handle business finances.

Q. Why not make ClinicOffice into a full accountancy package?

There are numerous reasons. Firstly, we don't really want to enter into competition with the likes of SAGE or QuickBooks which are both excellent, mature products backed by very large companies with decades of experience.

Also, ClinicOffice is currently in use in over 20 different countries - each with differing requirements for accounting practices and procedures. To implement full accountancy functionality into ClinicOffice would therefore be a huge undertaking. Furthermore, requirements for taxation calculations regularly change and again the workload involved in just keeping everything up-to-date would be colossal.

In view of the above, we'd rather focus our resources on continually improving and adding to ClinicOffice, while it works happily alongside dedicated accountancy software.