Nine Questions to Ask Before You Sign With a Billing Company

Start with scope, not price

Ask which stages of the revenue cycle they actually touch and which stay with your staff. The revenue cycle has eight stages and most billing companies own about five. The three usually left alone — eligibility, prior authorisation and registration — produce roughly a third of all denials. A company that has thought about this will answer with a boundary. One that has not will answer with a service list.

Then ask about denials and A/R

Ask to see denials grouped by root cause for the last quarter, with at least one category that shrank. Ask how they prioritise A/R — by age, by value, or by filing deadline. Only the last answer protects claims that are about to expire, and working an aging report oldest-first is both the intuitive method and close to the worst one.

Ask what happens if you leave

Data portability is what makes a month-to-month contract meaningful rather than decorative. Ask for a defined export format and a stated number of days, written into the agreement rather than promised on a call. If keeping your own data depends on goodwill, you do not have a short contract, you have a long one with extra steps.

Ask us all nine

We publish the full list, with what a good answer sounds like for each, as a printable sheet. Take it into every meeting you have, including the one with us. If we fail one of them, that is considerably better to discover before you sign than after.