Accounting

Most practices keep the diary in one system and the money in another, and pay for the join twice: at month end, keying figures into a spreadsheet, and at year end, explaining why the two do not quite agree. VeriPath Dental keeps the practice's books where the work happens — every charge, every NHS payment and every associate's pay run posted to the practice's own accounts as the work is done, so its finances are a ledger rather than an export.

A real set of books, on the practice's own server

The accounts run in ERPNext: one company per practice, with its own login and its own users, on the practice's own server. The chart of accounts is built for a clinic rather than a warehouse — the till, the card clearing account, money owed by patients, private fee income, associate fees, clinical waste, software licences — so the practice starts with books of its own, and nothing is pooled with another practice's figures.

The charge posts itself

When a course of treatment closes, the charge is raised under its own document number and the double entry follows with it: a private course into fee income, an NHS band charge into the account reserved for it. No month-end pile of billing waiting to be keyed in.

The two halves of NHS money never get confused

A band charge taken at reception is not the practice's income — the NHS takes it back out of the next contract payment. Rather than discover that at the year end, patient charges post to a clearing account of their own, and the month-end reconciliation against the NHSBSA schedule settles it in one journal: bank receipt, clawback and contract income on the same page.

Associate pay posts from the same reconciled figures

Pay statements are computed on the UDAs the schedule has reconciled, then posted as a journal — the associate's fee as the practice's cost, the net pay to the bank, and the superannuation withheld held as a liability in its own right. The largest cost a practice carries lands in the books the day it is signed off.

The reports your accountant asks for are already in it

Profit and loss, balance sheet, trial balance, general ledger — run against the practice's own figures whenever they are wanted, and every figure traces back to the document that produced it.

One click from the work to the document

Each charge carries the accounting document it became, and Open in ERPNext signs the manager in with the login they already have and opens that invoice, exactly as the accountant will see it. The desk opens on the accounts, not on an ERP's worth of modules nobody uses.

Part of the VeriPath Dental set

• NHS Contract & FP17 Claims — the claim behind an NHS patient charge.
• Invoicing — the charge, and the document it becomes in the books.